Transcript

Leo Laporte
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This is TWiT, This WEEK in TECH, Episode219 for November 2, 2009: Don’t Make Natali Cry.

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Leo Laporte
This is TWiT, This WEEK in TECH, the show that covers all things techy and geeky and that kind of thing. I’m Leo Laporte, joining us in studio today for first time since I’ve been on, since I’ve never met her before, the lovely, the talented Natali Del Conte.

Natali Del Conte
Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.

Leo Laporte
You were on when I was in China, I think?

Natali Del Conte
I was. Yes, you were in China and I was on with John Dvorak and Becky. And when I listened to that show, I was in my apartment in New York sitting on the floor and they were drinking wine. And so I thought, oh, I should show up…

Leo Laporte
With wine.

Natali Del Conte
Not empty handed, so I brought wine and homemade cookies.

Leo Laporte
You did. Boy, not empty handed. You covered both sides of the alley here. This is good.

Natali Del Conte
I also brought my mother, because I heard Patrick had his son on last week and I went the other way generationally. I don’t have any kids, but I went up the generation ladder.

Leo LaporteJason Calacanis is also here from the beautiful Brentwood.

Jason Calacanis
Ah, yes.

Leo Laporte
In the Cala Compound.

Jason Calacanis
Fresh Prince of Brentwood.

Leo Laporte
Jason, explain to me, every time I have a lovely young lady in here, they bring their mother. Is something I should be worried about? I think it’s a chaperone.

Jason Calacanis
You’re a married man.

Leo Laporte
I know, I’m harmless.

Natali Del Conte
My lawyer told me it was a good thing to do.

Jason Calacanis
I think they’re all trying to fix up their moms with you.

Leo Laporte
Maybe that’s it. That could be it. That could well be it. It’s good to talk you, I haven’t talked to you in ages.

Jason Calacanis
I’m like so excited, I can’t – I’m like, more excited than ever and also terrified at the same time. It’s a really interesting feeling for me. I’m not usually terrified of anything.

Leo Laporte
Oh, you should be terrified of this. This is nothing. I mean entrepreneurship is nothing. Launching, birthing a company is nothing compared to birthing a baby.

Jason Calacanis
Yeah, so we’re excited.

Leo Laporte
And you won’t even be – you won’t even be doing any of the work. You’ll just be sitting there pacing.

Jason Calacanis
I tell you, this whole pregnancy thing? So far so good. I feel great.

Natali Del Conte
I’m sure it’s hard to find – to find a way to add value when you’re just kind of watching the whole process.

Leo Laporte
It is hard. It’s a little – you feel bad a little bit. To – like, all the suffering’s going on the other side. But don’t worry, Jason, the nausea begins in the first trimester after birth for the father. Just thought you’d like to know, something to look forward to. And the lack of sleep is instantaneous. Anyway that’s great, that’s soon. That’s like a month.

Jason Calacanis
I am giving my last keynote, I’m gonna retire from keynoting, I’m going to do my last keynote next week and that’s it, no more travel, nothing.

Leo Laporte
Oh, well congratulations.

Jason Calacanis
Yes.

Leo Laporte
You can still do TWiT, though, because that’s the kind of thing you can do with a baby in your life.

Jason Calacanis
Of course, yeah, totally.

Leo Laporte
We found that out last week.

Jason Calacanis
Oh, did you have a crying baby on the show?

Leo Laporte
Patrick Norton brought Shamus’ two-year-old.

Jason Calacanis
Oh, that’s awesome.

Leo Laporte
Oh, Lordy, Lordy. That was something – he actually left about a third of the way through. In fact we may – he may show up again, because he said, can I come back next week? And I said, yes but he hasn’t, he hasn’t come back, so. He may walk in the door at any minute.

Natali Del Conte
You have a real revolving door here.

Leo Laporte
I do.

Natali Del Conte
It’s an open door.

Leo Laporte
That’s a good way to put it.

Natali Del Conte
That’s nice.

Leo Laporte
It was literally open, wasn’t it?

Natali Del Conte
It was open.

Leo Laporte
You just walked right in. Yes.

Natali Del Conte
I just waltzed in. Yeah, anyone can come off the street, sit down and podcast.

Natali Del Conte
It’s a really fun phone and Google announced this week now that it’s doing satnav on Google maps, but only with Android 2.0 which – this is the only phone now running Android 2.0. So I used the satnav to get here, because…

Leo Laporte
Did it work?

Natali Del Conte
…I came from San Francisco, I was filming Loaded at CNET and I put in the address here and it worked great, yeah.

Leo Laporte
It is – it feels really nice, it’s not – if you compare it to the iPhone, it’s about the same size, screen is – maybe is a little taller, slightly wider, higher res.

Natali Del Conte
Right. It feels heavier to me than the iPhone.

Leo Laporte
Well, it is a little heavier, isn’t it?

Natali Del Conte
Yeah, the camera is 5 megamixels. So – and it’s got a faster processor. So there’s a lot of guts in there, that it’s going to maybe feel a bit heavier. And I also wish the edges were rounded, because I don’t think it’s as comfortable in your hand. But other than that, I think it’s really, really great.

Leo Laporte
It’s got a real keyboard, now this is a tiny keyboard. You have small fingers, so this might be okay for you. But I think I’d have trouble typing with this.

Natali Del Conte
Well, that’s the problem with small hands, is when I hold it in – one in each hands, my little tiny thumbs don’t reach to the centre of the keyboard. So I have to keep curling my hands in. But the virtual keyboard works great, so most of the time I don’t opt for the physical keyboard.

Leo Laporte
And it’s got the new Android 2.0 operating system on it. Have you – have you – did you use the 1G phone? Can you compare it to the 1G?

Natali Del Conte
A little bit. I didn’t use the 1G extensively. But I do find it to be – it gets to the Android marketplace, it syncs well with Exchange, it’s – again, fast.

Leo Laporte
It feels very snappy.

Natali Del Conte
Yeah, snappy.

Leo Laporte
Much snappier than the 1G did.

Natali Del Conte
I really like it. I’m a fan of it. I like that the camera also has a flash. There’s 16 gigs of onboard memory. I listened to last week’s TWiT over Google Listen, that’s great.

Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah. Google Listen is a nice podcast application.

Natali Del Conte
Really nice. It works on the [inaudible] (6:35)…

Jason Calacanis
Wow, I’ve never even heard of this. What is Google Listen? Is it an Android application?

Leo Laporte
Yes, it’s in the Android Marketplace.

Jason Calacanis
Oh. Is it made by Google?

Natali Del Conte
It is. It’s a Google product that takes RSS feeds of podcasts and you can listen to them and it will cache it locally, so that I can walk outside – I need a block or two of leeway, but if I start listening to a podcast and then get on the subway, it will continue to play that podcast, because…

Leo Laporte
It’s definitely one of the best podcast applications I’ve ever seen.

Jason Calacanis
This is the thing that’s really interesting, I just had an epiphany. The – everybody talks about the iPhone’s lead in the application business. If Google is going to make applications for their own phones, they have like thousands of really great programmers, they own the most, the best web app programmers on the planet. Are they going to just start releasing like a program or two a week?

Leo Laporte
They certainly could, couldn’t they?

Natali Del Conte
They could.

Jason Calacanis
They could make everything that is great – they could make their own version of everything that’s great on the iPhone. I mean…

Leo Laporte
Today, or this week, Apple announced that there are over 100,000 apps, 102,000 apps that they had approved and about 97,000 of them were in the store. 97,000 applications!

Jason Calacanis
That’s extraordinary.

Natali Del Conte
Right.

Leo Laporte
That just shows the developers are happy with the business model. Some people complained about, the 70% / 30% split.

Jason Calacanis
It’s better that percent than 100% of zero.

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Natali Del Conte
But I’ve never seen a demographic breakdown of developers. And a lot of people think that the developers that are writing applications are a lot of 14-year old kids or…

Leo Laporte
Some of them look like it.

Natali Del Conte
…who are not really – because that’s why there’s so many of them, is because there’s a lot of crap.

Leo Laporte
Yeah a lot of flashlights.

Natali Del Conte
…a lot of crap.

Leo Laporte
I don’t think that’s bad. I think that means that – first of all, that 14-year old who’s writing an application today, in five years he’s going to be writing really good applications.

Natali Del Conte
Right.

Leo Laporte
So it’s not a bad thing. Remember, Apple used to put Apple IIs in every school, because they wanted to get their – to cultivate those kids. It also means that the – it’s easy to write. If it were hard to write, you wouldn’t get a 14-year old writing applications.

Natali Del Conte
Right.

Leo Laporte
So I don’t think that’s necessarily a negative, I mean…

Natali Del Conte
Right, I think – but the point I’m trying to make is that we don’t know that the younger developers are really okay with the…

Leo Laporte
They have a sense, yeah.

Natali Del Conte
…revenue model, they might just be okay with doing it for practice in sort of an open community forum.

Leo Laporte
Well, I’ve seen developers talk – in fact, Scoble has an article on his blog the last couple of days saying, developers when faced with all the different platforms to develop, and they’ve got to make that choice, pretty much always come down to two: Android and iPhone. That make sense. And what’s significantly missing is BlackBerry.

Natali Del Conte
BlackBerry.

Leo Laporte
That’s not good for BlackBerry.

Jason Calacanis
And BlackBerry is the leader in smartphone penetration right now.

Leo Laporte
Easily.

Jason Calacanis
So it’s kind of odd.

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Jason Calacanis
I just got to have App World, which they’ve just released. And so I’ve been playing with the App World. But you go in there and it’s like going into a Wal-Mart if like, half the shelves were empty, it’s like, it should be more things in here. You pull up like, you pull up certain categories, and you’re like, really there’s nothing here, where is everything, where did everybody go?

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Jason Calacanis
It’s kind of sad.

Natali Del Conte
Agreed.

Jason Calacanis
But then people are going to be able to launch these applications instantly. So this whole idea on Android, you just point to a URL and you can download an application, it doesn’t – you don’t even go through Google.

Leo Laporte
Right.

Jason Calacanis
You just go direct.

Leo Laporte
Do you – I mean, it’s interesting that Google is doing turn-by-turn navigation. They say they’re going to try to get it in the Apple Store. There’s no way Apple will let them do that, because Apple’s – it even says in the terms of service, no turn-by-turn navigation. Well, obviously without our approval, because TomTom’s doing it, a few are doing it.

Natali Del Conte
Right. And they charge an arm and a leg for it.

Leo Laporte
I can’t see – I can’t see Apple saying yes. But on the other hand, with all the attention they’re getting from the FCC right now, maybe they can’t say no, maybe they just don’t have that option. So – you said it worked pretty well. Do you think it replaces your TomTom or your Garmin?

Natali Del Conte
Well, I’m probably the wrong person to ask about this, because I don’t drive, I live in New York City. So I don’t need turn-by-turn navigation all that often. But in the off chance that I do get a zip car and need it, then this is much, much…

Leo Laporte
It’s all you need.

Natali Del Conte
Yeah, it is all you need, I don’t have a separate GPS.

Leo Laporte
Why get more?

Natali Del Conte
But I don’t think – and it didn’t lead me wrong here, except when I pulled off to go to Jack in the Box on my way up here. And it did tell me to go…

Leo Laporte
Rhonda, you let Natali go to Jack in the Box?

Rhonda
I was starving.

Leo Laporte
It was her idea? Mom says Jack – that’s very cute. In-N-Out next time though...

Natali Del Conte
I know well…

Rhonda
It was last night.

Natali Del Conte
Yeah we did go to…

Leo Laporte
Last night, you went to In-N-Out?

Natali Del Conte
After our Halloween.

Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah. That’s nothing like the 80 [inaudible] (11:01) bars and then an In-N-Out burger to really settle the stomach.

Natali Del Conte
Well, I made the cookies before we went out last night for Halloween, so I was…

Leo Laporte
Did you have a costume?

Natali Del Conte
I did. I was a top chef.

Leo Laporte
Oh, how cute.

Natali Del Conte
I saw your costume on Facebook, you were [inaudible] (11:15)?

Leo Laporte
Yeah, that’s good, that’s probably what I was.

Natali Del Conte
You didn’t know?

Leo Laporte
People asked me, I said I am [inaudible] (11:21) I didn’t know.

Natali Del Conte
Did you do any [inaudible] (11:23)?

Leo Laporte
I was a [inaudible] (11:23). Yeah, you’re right, that’s – yeah, I could have, I should have. I could have spun around like crazy. But did you – you don’t trick or treat, Jason? Do you bring tourists and fondue out your bulldogs?

Jason Calacanis
There is a thing called Bow-Wow-Ween here in Brentwood. And it’s…

Leo Laporte
Oh, geez. You, Ted Dansen, Jill Clayburgh, the gang…

Jason Calacanis
It’s basically everybody gets together, me and Ted, yeah, and they dress up their dogs. And I just…

Leo Laporte
This was – I just want to say, this is why the rest of the world hates us. I just want to point that.

Natali Del Conte
And that’s why the dogs hate us.

Jason Calacanis
Oh, absolutely.

Leo Laporte
The dogs, not just the rest of the world, the dogs.

Jason Calacanis
I mean other places in the world, they’re eating dogs because they’re actually you know…

Leo Laporte
I had Aussie, our little pappion dog in a sombrero and a sarape. It was cute. I think it’s meant for a Chihuahua. But he’s the same size, so.

Natali Del Conte
How multi-cultural of you.

Leo Laporte
Yes, I thought that was very diverse.

Natali Del Conte
…[indiscernible] (12:14) person and a Mexican dog.

Leo Laporte
I was in a fex and – yeah, and the dog was from down under.

Jason Calacanis
How much more dangerous is it to use mobile phone for turn-by-turn navigation then an in-unit, designed for when you’re driving kind of unit? I mean this seems like a recipe for disaster.

Leo Laporte
It’s a recipe anyway. Come on, Jason, when you use your GPS, you look over at it, you touch it, you press the buttons.

Jason Calacanis
Well, actually in the cars I have, a number of the units don’t allow you to touch it unless you’re going under 5 miles an hour or something. That’s one of the reasons to get an external unit like a Dash like – which has now been sold to BlackBerry. But that’s the reason I use the Dash, because when I’m on the highway, if I’m stuck in traffic I can touch it. But holding it in your hand, I don’t have to hold the GPS unit in my hand to do the commands, it’s mounted.

Leo Laporte
Right.

Natali Del Conte
Right.

Jason Calacanis
So I mean sort of this un-mounted thing, and I see cab drivers doing this now and it makes me really nervous.

Leo Laporte
Oh, that’s bad.

Jason Calacanis
Also the screen size is what, half the size? A third of the size?

Leo Laporte
It should really be – you should have a little holder for it.

Natali Del Conte
I thought I saw that there were already third-parties making holders for this that will mount in your car. But also when you think of the traditional satnav devices, they’re made by a company that doesn’t make phones. And so they make some kind of nonsensical decisions, like a keyboard that’s not Qwerty, but instead alphabetical, or – it’s not an interface that you get used to. So if it’s your phone, you have your hands on this all day, you have a lot of muscle memory when it comes to using that phone. So if you do need a touch it a little bit while you’re driving, at least your body is already ready for that.

Leo Laporte
Where do you stand on – this is actually a very interesting question. Where do you stand on – because you use a lot of portable devices. The idea that everything should be in one device? Or is it better to have a music player and a GPS and a phone? You want it all in one device?

Natali Del Conte
Well, that’s the thing is that I’m – may – if I decide to make this my primary phone, then that – that takes me off of iTunes, which is where I tend to keep and store my music. So then will I go to an iPod Touch or an iPod Classic and may be I like that idea, maybe I don’t, I know Donald Bell who reviews MP3 players at CNET, says he really likes the idea of having someone else – or having a standalone MP3 player.

Leo Laporte
Like best in class. Like it’s the best MP3 player that could be, it’s the best navigation it could be, it’s the best phone it could be, instead of compromising.

Natali Del Conte
Right. So I don’t know. I think it really depends device by device. I don’t love reading books on my phone, even though the Kindle has an iPhone application. I like to have a standalone device as an e-reader, so. I think it really it’s going to depend on the function.

Leo Laporte
How about you, Jason? You got an opinion on that?

Jason Calacanis
I always carry my BlackBerry and my iPhone with me.

Leo Laporte
Oh, interesting. You have two phones.

Jason Calacanis
I have two devices. I will never be with one phone. Because it’s too – I need to get on email, sometimes it’s an emergency, sometimes I’m the only person who can answer a question, sometimes I got to check the Knicks score, whatever. There’s important things going on and..

Natali Del Conte
Redundancy.

Leo Laporte
Hey, by the way, what did you and Mark Cuban say at the Dallas game, at the Mavericks-Lakers?

Jason Calacanis
We were just...

Leo Laporte
Were you like, sitting next to each other kind of?

Jason Calacanis
No, I – somebody who I know had second row seats, so he got me second row seats and then Mark was right across. So he saw me and came over and we just chatted it up for a little bit, but...

Leo Laporte
I’d love to be a fly in the wall for that one.

Jason Calacanis
You know, when’s is at a game, number one, I don’t – like, one time I went to a game with him, I went to – he got me tickets for the all star game a couple of years back, and we hung out in the suite with Dirk and [inaudible] (15:40) and everything. And it was cool, because he’s not in the game. But when it’s a game that he’s playing in, you do not want to – I don’t want to sit next to him. Because he gets in a foul mood if they’re losing, and he gets insane and he’s arguing with people like five rows in front of – behind him. He’s arguing with the refs. You know I mean…

Leo Laporte
He’s throwing chairs.

Jason Calacanis
I mean – well, he did get fined for running on the court. I mean the guy’s really passionate about it. So – that’s like him working. So you know, like if – people who don’t know him are like, hey, we should go to a game together. And I never ask him, like, hey, go to game together. Because I know how he is, it’s work. That’s like asking somebody who’s a conductor like, hey, can I go hang out with you at – you know, when you’re conducting an orchestra? It’s like, no, it’s – he’s actually really into it. So.

Natali Del Conte
And also, his reputation is for being fairly bombastic in that way.

Jason Calacanis
Yeah. But I mean he’s like, he was like the mayor of the Staples Center. I mean everybody is coming up to say hello to him and people are yelling his name. I mean he really has done an amazing thing for the NBA in terms of getting excitement. When he comes to it and his arena is sold out, number one. He’s in the top three or four arenas in terms of being sold out. And when he goes to an arena, when Dallas goes to an arena, I mean those games sell out. Because people want to see him, they want to see the Mavericks. He creates a sense of excitement, so good for him.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, nothing wrong with that.

Jason Calacanis
Yeah. But I think, I like the idea of having redundant, so when I was at that game, I was taking pictures of like – or videos of Posh Spice, who was there with Becks and you know, Kelsey Grammar and all that stuff. But I was like, I’m going to take a video with my iPhone, I’m going to take a picture of my BlackBerry and one’s uploading, so I can use the other one. I think people are going to have multiple devices. But the devices will share functionality. So your Kindle will let you do email and surf the web eventually, and you’ll be able to have ebooks from your Kindle on your iPhone. But you’re going to use whichever one is best, and people have multiple ones. Because the cost of these things is also going to go down.

Leo Laporte
I’d love to get that Kindle into something. Because you don’t want to carry that Kindle around all the time. And this a category that’s exploding. Not only Barnes & Noble, I just saw – who else has just announced an ebook reader they are going to do an ebook reader?

Jason Calacanis
I don’t understand why they just have this like aversion to letting you do email or surf the web on it. It’s – I mean it’s clearly capable of that. So why would you punish people for buying a [indiscernible] (18:07) device.

Natali Del Conte
No, I don’t think it’s really that capable of that. The Kindle is a slow device. It takes – I mean even the – they say...

Leo Laporte
The screen is really slow. The screen is really, really slow.

Jason Calacanis
Yeah.

Natali Del Conte
The screen is slow. It doesn’t change pages all that quickly. So I wouldn’t want to do too much web search. I mean if you go to the web...

Leo Laporte
One person in the chatroom said I read books. One person.

Jason Calacanis
Yeah.

Natali Del Conte
I read..

Jason Calacanis
But he’s lying. He buys books.

Patrick Norton
I buy them. They’re on my shelf. I don’t read them.

Jason Calacanis
Well, but what about like if you wanted to get the weather or text based stuff, I’m not saying you’re going to be using Flash and playing FarmVille on your Kindle. But what if it shows you the Knicks score, it shows you the weather...

Leo Laporte
I’d play, I’d play FarmVille on my Kindle. And thank God they don’t have FarmVille on my Kindle.

Jason Calacanis
Oh, forget about that. I mean people will be playing FarmVille and imagine they put FarmVille on the GPS?

Leo Laporte
Did you get sucked into that FarmVille thing?

Jason Calacanis
I played it for – I said I have to check this out, because it’s all over my Facebook news feed. I turned it on, and then I looked up and I think it went from being Monday to Wednesday.

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Jason Calacanis
Whatever they’re doing, I think they’re hypnotizing people on that game. It’s the most addictive crack.

Leo Laporte
It’s brilliant. Do you play that, Natali?

Jason Calacanis
So it’s Age of Empires.

Natali Del Conte
No. I ignore all the invitations on Facebook.

Leo Laporte
Some of it about, it’s the Zynga stuff. These guys, they’re – what is it? They’re crushing it?

Natali Del Conte
They are crushing it.

Jason Calacanis
They have crushed it, yes, they are crushing it.

Leo Laporte
150 million a year.

Jason Calacanis
It’s nuts. I remember when Mark Pincus – I’m pretty good friends with him – and we were at dinner and he said, I’m thinking of buying this poker company and what do you think? And I was like, I don’t know, you know, it sounds like casual games have been done, you know.

Leo Laporte
No, no, no…

Jason Calacanis
Absolutely wrong, absolutely wrong. He was so fast on that, and I begged Sequoia Capital to invest in that company.

Leo Laporte
Oh yeah.

Jason Calacanis
When I was working there as a consultant. And Fred Wilson wound up doing it, who had invested in Mark’s first company. But they have figured out what’s addictive about the social games and what’s unique about being able to play.

Leo Laporte
That’s their success, isn’t it?

Jason Calacanis
Invite your friends to this and now I’m going to – if I invite you, then I get extra points and goal to plant better trees, and they’ve really nailed that piece of it.

Leo Laporte
Does Pincus have like some expert in that working on this? I mean I would think that this must be a speciality. Is – like, game addiction specialist. Like a person who could turn that stuff on.

Jason Calacanis
Yeah, I mean in truth – and this is no dig to Zynga. All of this had been done already in other games, just Age of Empires, you had the same...

Leo Laporte
But putting it on Facebook was what did it.

Jason Calacanis
Yeah. So what they basically did was, they figured out a way to sort of strip the games down into something simpler and – this is for middle America. This is like moms and students and playing this, grandmas – and it’s supper addictive and social. And what do we like about playing games? It’s playing games with other people. This is what the Nintendo Wii did. It’s not the technology, it’s the socialization of the technology that really makes it explode. But the virtual currency is amazing. I mean that really – people are more motivated by virtual currency than real currency.

Natali Del Conte
You know, I was reading the The Wealth of Networks by Yochai.

Leo Laporte
Great book.

Natali Del Conte
And he says something in there that I’ve been thinking about lately about how it used to be before the digital revolution, that from 9 to 5 we had some kind of hierarchical relationship with production, so you produce something, you bought something, you sold something.

Leo Laporte
It was called a job.

Natali Del Conte
Right, and then come quitting time you were then a consumer.

Leo Laporte
Right.

Natali Del Conte
And so it was duplicitous, you were either that or you were this and now the digital world is blurring our reality so much that you are both a consumer and a producer at the same time and I think this Farmville really speaks to that is that you don’t have to be one or the other, you are both again producer, consumer and that’s…

Leo Laporte
Very interesting.

Natali Del Conte
…what they call the user. Yeah, it’s a really interesting change in the way that we interact with anything.

Leo Laporte
I cut you off, his last name is Benkler. The book is online, The Wealth of Networks.

Natali Del Conte
It’s a great book, really interesting.

Leo Laporte
It’s fascinating. Let me take a break and speaking of books and we are going to talk a little bit about Audible and we will come back, Natali Del Conte is here. She is the star of, what? CNET. What are you the star of? Are you on a regular show on CNET or…

Natali Del Conte
I am.

Leo Laporte
…because you’re on Buzz Out Loud pretty regularly.

Natali Del Conte
Yes I do Buzz Out Loud two days a week.

Leo Laporte
Two days a week.

Natali Del Conte
And then I have a regular show called Loaded which is…

Leo Laporte
Loaded, that it’s.

Natali Del Conte
Your daily tech wrap up of what’s going on, it’s five minutes every morning and I also do tech reporting for the CBS early show and CBS news local affiliates.

Jason Calacanis
Thank you, thank you for the inspiration and I have learned a lot about doing the show from you.

Leo Laporte
You got a, last time I talked with you a had a web page this, This Week In, right or is that moving along, what’s the deal with that?

Jason Calacanis
I just, I bought the domain name this weekend and my idea for it and I sort of ran up – up the flagpole with you and when I bought it was, just make a landing page where we can put all of these great, This Week In… shows, This Week in Google has been a great addition and then here is people outside, so may be we can centralize some of the stuff and sell advertising into it.

Leo Laporte
Cool.

Jason Calacanis
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
Always liked the idea.

Natali Del Conte
Very nice.

Leo Laporte
But I am going to mention something that will make you even more excited right now, it’s called…

Jason Calacanis
What?

Leo Laporte
…you know what I am talking about, audible.com, baby.

Jason Calacanis
Audible, it’s have taken up so much of my time I don’t know if they are going to ask you to talk about the Copper Bracelet.

Leo Laporte
They are.

Jason Calacanis
Oh really.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah.

Jason Calacanis
Oh, this is great. I mean this is made for the medium content. I mean this is not a book made into audio book. These are the great thriller writers and they’re making content directly for audio books. So made for the medium. They know this is going to be an audio book and they are writing it to be an audio book, really fantastic and it’s…

Leo Laporte
They did this last year.

Jason Calacanis
Chopin Manuscript, I think is a follow up and you can get it now. I think you can download the first chapter or two for free. I don’t if they…

Leo Laporte
They had, I screwed it up last week, they had the first chapter free last week and now you can get the whole book for $9.95 at our special place, its audible.com/twitcopper. So this is Jeffery Deaver and people know him, he is of course a bestseller, thriller author. He wrote the first chapter, gave it to another writer Gayle Lynds who wrote the second chapter. She gave it to David Houston who wrote the third chapter. Which must be fun for these guys, 16 of very well known thriller writers in all and then Deaver gets it and writes the last chapter. You know Molly Wood and Tom Merritt and I did kind of something like that on Twitter. We did that 140 character novel but I think these guys are probably better.

Jason Calacanis
Yeah, but leave -- let’s leave it to the professionals.

Leo Laporte
Alfred Molina does the narration. He did the Chopin Manuscript and he is very good. He also did Da Vinci Code, Spiderman II. I think I will play a little bit if you want to.

Jason Calacanis
Yeah, let’s hear.

Leo Laporte
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. They don’t have the preview on here and let see me if can see it, here it is, here is a little bit from the Chopin Manuscript.

Born in New Delhi and now he liked to think a resident of the world. He was observing the family through expensive binoculars from 100 yards away in the hills above the beach. He was parked in a rented Fiat, listening to some syrupy French pop music. He was taking in the gray water, the gray sky…

Leo Laporte
I can’t wait to listen to this.

Jason Calacanis
It’s good, right?

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Jason Calacanis
All of a sudden, it’s like what’s a syrupy...?

Leo Laporte
Yeah, I need to hear more, I need to hear more, yeah.

Jason Calacanis
That’s the great thing about audio books, they are just like when you are driving instead of listening to commercials, you could be listening to these like professional authors like with this really thrilling stuff. I’m mean, this will probably be made into a movie, or a TV special.

Leo Laporte
I just got a, I got a new car which I was supposed to talk about this week and I can’t talk about until next week, but it has an audio system that ties into my iPhone and when I get in the car the book starts and when I leave the car it stops.

Natali Del Conte
Wow.

Leo Laporte
And I am in heaven now. I am just like in heaven.

Jason Calacanis
It’s amazing this simple little feature like just knowing where you left off it’s just so important.

Leo Laporte
It’s so cool. Audible.com.

Jason Calacanis
I think I know what car -- I know what car that is by the way because I know the car that has that system.

Leo Laporte
It’s so awesome. Actually we are going to advertise the system next week but I can’t talk about it until then because they are still doing some research on it. So I will next week, I was going to do it this week and next week I will talk it about it.

Natali Del Conte
Is it parked outside?

Leo Laporte
You can see it out the window. It’s the new TWiT mobile.

Natali Del Conte
I’ll to the embargo.

Leo Laporte
There is an embargo. I wish there weren’t. It is the hardest thing I have ever done. I don’t normally accept embargoes or NDAs from other people and now I am embargoing myself and it’s like I want to just nail my head with it.

Jason Calacanis
Wait, wait you don’t say because you want to get it perfect when you do, do it?

Leo Laporte
I can’t talk too much about why, but the campaign starts next week. They don’t want us to talk about it until the campaign starts because they are doing research now, et cetera. Anyway Jeffery Deaver, Lisa Lee Scottoline, Joseph Finder, Lee Child and a cast of 16 of the best writers, Alfred Molina you don’t get a better narrator and it’s yours right now for $9.95 at audible.com/twitcopper. We love Audible, we know you will so give them a try.

Jason Calacanis
And you know if you are fan of the show you already have an Audible subscription code…

Leo Laporte
I know.

Jason Calacanis
You are going to pick this up, what you want to do this to support the show and, I mean the show is free. You don’t charge, you could easily charge like a lot of other people do and the show is frankly you can have twice as many ads in the show, it would still be just as good, you are pretty reserved in the amount of ads you put in, why not just tweet thanks to audible.com/twitcopper, c-o-p-p-e-r, two pp’s in that for those people who are dyslexic like me. You tweet that on behalf of the show and just say thank you to Audible for supporting independent media. You know that means a lot to Audible. I know because I talked to these guys, they are audible_com and they love to see that every Sunday when you do your show every Friday, when I do my show they see thanksaudible_com, that’s their @ symbol. And they get like a couple of hundred followers, follow Audible, it means something to them. And they have been a supporter of this show since the beginning almost, right?

Leo Laporte
Yeah. I think this is their year now. So we are grateful to them, we’re grateful to you for listening the show. Let’s see, we have been talking about Android, there’s so much news about this – about this Android – 3, 2.0 and the new Droid phone. The Ares which is the next one we now know is going to come out October – November 6 right so it’s like a week away, but that’s …

Natali Del Conte
The Droid comes out November 6.

Leo Laporte
The Droid is November 6 and the Ares is another month after that…

Natali Del Conte
I thought it I just saw it.

Leo Laporte
It’s unfortunately, it’s 1.6 it’s not 2.0. I don’t why they are putting the old Android in there.

Natali Del Conte
And it’s got a smaller processor, so it’s kind of well …

Leo Laporte
I’m disappointed. But it’s 99 bucks.

Natali Del Conte
Yeah, I think it’s....

Leo Laporte
How much was that?

Natali Del Conte
This one will be $199.

Leo Laporte
Like the iPhone.

Natali Del Conte
I have to give this one back, this is not my phone, I just got it for a while …

Leo Laporte
It’s a review unit.

Natali Del Conte
Yeah, and …

Leo Laporte
But I would – I might be going to the Verizon store now that I have played with it, I kind of like it. You know what I ordered that – I mentioned this before as the Nokia N900, which is Nokia’s tablet and it’s on Maemo, it’s another Linux distro called Maemo that Nokia has developed. It looks very sweet.

Natali Del Conte
I have the N800 …

Leo Laporte
You have the 800, yeah, I have the 810.

Natali Del Conte
I used to have like 800 and 810.

Leo Laporte
Didn’t like it that much, sluggish. This is going to be better.

Natali Del Conte
It was sluggish and I couldn’t really figure out what to do with it, when I needed it that.

Leo Laporte
This has a phone in it. That’s the difference, it’s now your phone.

Natali Del Conte
Right, that’s I wanted from that.

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Natali Del Conte
Yeah, which carrier would that be on?

Leo Laporte
It’s unlocked, I’ll have to put on T-Mobile.

Natali Del Conte
No.

Leo Laporte
But T-Mobile, it’s designed for the T-Mobile frequencies as well as other world frequencies, so it will work well.

Natali Del Conte
So now, with Android and then the Ares they’re going to have a lot more…

Leo Laporte
We’re going to see a ton of Android phones too, this is just the beginning.

Natali Del Conte
Yeah.

Jason Calacanis
This is going to be – in the same way it was the golden age of the Internet for the last couple of years with Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, AOL all battling it out for features and offering stuff for free. That’s what we’re going into now, it’s golden age for development of these platforms with the bandwidth increasing, screen size increasing, processor speed and now these developers charged up and a monetization system – there’s going to be things that are coming out, I was talking to some people about, Biometrics, if you’ve ever known anybody who had heart attack, they have them put a thing on their side, the halter monitor, that monitors your heart rate for 24 hours and then you – listen to the tapes, and look for patterns and stuff like that and – the Fit Bit which was one of the Tech Crunch 50 companies two years ago just launched where you put it on your side, it recognizes when you’re sleeping and how many walks you take like a pedometer. These things are all going to start -- these new sort of hardware sensors are going to start to be put on your phones and whatnot …

Leo Laporte
Everywhere, everywhere.

Jason Calacanis
And you’re going to able to monitor this wholes – there’s a term for it that these Tim O’Reilly geeks have been calling it, I forgot the name of it but a lot of good things start in his food camp or whatever. This sort of monitoring yourself obsessively, your weight…

Natali Del Conte
Biometrics or something?

Leo Laporte
No, no you’re talking about Gordon Bell and...

Jason Calacanis
Yeah it has – it have a buzzword for it.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, he wrote a book, what’s it called? Life, life …

Jason Calacanis
It’ll be in the chat room but it mean it’s specially, this is for OCD people. Typically programmers who got too fat and then they started – it’s like always these stories, you can find these websites, like a programmer who got like 100 pounds overweight and then they monitored their calories and put it in an excel spreadsheet and then did a program and then they walked a certain amount and they knew their exact net-in, net-out calories and they watched themselves get really skinny.

Natali Del Conte
I saw something at i-stage last week in Phoenix, this company that had developed a technology but takes your Biometric readings such as your pulse and your temperature and your heart rate and all that stuff. From in-ear systems that can be built into your existing Bluetooth headset or your ear buds, or whatever it is that you already put….

Jason Calacanis
Oh it’s genius.

Natali Del Conte
Yeah, I mean and it worked pretty well and the guy sort of did something jumping jacks and then ran around the stage a bit and it gave a real time feed and then you can …

Leo Laporte
It’s like a Fit Bit right?

Natali Del Conte
It is like the Fit Bit but I don’t have to put another gadget on my person because I am already carrying around in ear buds or I don’t use [indiscernible] (31:57) but…

Leo Laporte
Add to that a camera. This is what Bell does – he calls it the SenseCam. He’s a Microsoft researcher but he also was a founder of Digital Equipment. His book is Total Recall. And he takes – the camera takes a picture every few seconds of everything he’s doing and done.

Natali Del Conte
Not internally I hope, not inside his person.

Leo Laporte
No, it’s around his neck but the idea is that you create this Lifestream, a mountain of data that is everything that you’ve ever done, that records everything you’ve ever seen, it might as well get the biodata as well. Now who’s going to look at this, I don’t know. but I guess if – if it’s searchable – you never – his wife Gwen Bell who founded the computer history museum in the South Bay, passed away of Alzheimer’s eventually, she had Alzheimer’s. And I think he’s probably moved a little by the notion of, as she forgot her life, this idea that you’d had everything, recorded.

Natali Del Conte
Right.

Leo Laporte
Your brain.

Jason Calacanis
This was actually a William Gibson novel, in the Adoro series.

Leo Laporte
Yes.

Jason Calacanis
He had little zeppelins, balloons that would float above you, almost like in Sim City, they have that little thing that floats above you like a crystal or whatever? And people would be walking around the club or the city and it would have multiple camera angles streaming back to some server somewhere that records your whole life, and then you could either sell access to your life, or go back and get it and – if you include the biometric data and imagine you get an injury and they’re like, well – we actually looking back – it looks like on September 17, did something happen? Because it looks like you fell, and that might have been when you hurt your knee – it’s…

Natali Del Conte
Can you rewind if you have all of these data, just undo something.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, you could go, you could search. Well undo, I don’t know – we don’t do undo yet.

Natali Del Conte
I can control Z my life.

Leo Laporte
I would be nice.

Jason Calacanis
I would like to cut and paste some stuff that happened when I was 23 in college.

Leo Laporte
Bring it back, bring it back.

Jason Calacanis
Yeah I’d like to cut and paste myself back into that night, it was a pretty good night.

Leo Laporte
The article, very interesting article in abovethecrowd.com about that says Google redefines disruption, the less than free, a business model and some interesting quotes about Android. Android is not only a phone OS, it’s a consumer electronics OS. If Ford or BMW wanted to build an in-dash Android GPS, guess what? Google gives it to them for free and then the kicker, because Google gives you ad splits on search if you use their version. So Google in effect takes you to use their mobile OS. That’s why he calls it the less than free business model, does that make sense I mean Jason, you’re – you’re a search mogul.

Jason Calacanis
Yeah, absolutely I mean – there’s also an anti-competitive law against this, when you sell something in the market for less than it’s worth, so this is a whole new brave world, where it’s like I am giving something away, essentially to kill a competitor and if Google is giving – Google’s giving away Office right now essentially to – kick Microsoft where it hurts, right. And they want to destroy Office not because they gain anything by destroying office, because they hurt Microsoft and where their revenue is and – that’s why Microsoft is so obsessed with search as well although with search, them getting into search means a revenue model.

Leo Laporte
But look at how much money Firefox makes from Google because they have a got Google search box in Firefox…

Jason Calacanis
Yes sure.

Leo Laporte
Extend that model to everything if the operating system is Andriod.

Jason Calacanis
I mean if you follow the logical conclusion, eventually they would give hardware away for free. If a netbook costs $300, $400, you can easily make that back in adsense…

Leo Laporte
Right.

Jason Calacanis
Not easily, but you might be able to. And if you – certainly if every time you open the computer you play a 30-second spot or you have to watch five 30-second spots a day, at some point it would pay for itself and Bill Gross of Idealab who created Overture which was essentially what Google’s become with the ad sense, who is pretty much the most underrated…

Leo Laporte
He is brilliant, I love Bill.

Jason Calacanis
…sort of genius of our time. He saw this. He had a company called Free-PC.

Leo Laporte
Right.

Jason Calacanis
And you could buy a PC – it was essentially free, it was like $20 a month for the ISP, you got the PC for free, and it had a little toolbar at the bottom that had banner ads go by. And they’ve sent out I think tens of thousands of this computers and they were making a network. Guess what, if you had the ability, if you were NBC or something, you have a lot of video inventory, if you put out a computer there, every time you boot it, it forced a commercial, sure, it would make a ton of money.

By the way – [indiscernible] is (36:16) Bill Gurley; he is a famous venture capitalist from Benchmark.

Leo Laporte
Oh, you know him, okay.

Jason Calacanis
I know Bill. He is a really smart guy.

Leo Laporte
That’s a very good…

Jason Calacanis
Not a good porker player. Lost a lot of money at the [indiscernible] (36:27) conference, a lot of money.

Leo Laporte
Well that’s good because I’m going to start reading this because this was a very – I thought a very insightful…

Jason Calacanis
He did eBay.

Leo Laporte
He did eBay? Okay.

Jason Calacanis
There is a book called eBoys, that you can get on Audible about Benchmark and their company. It’s a VC firm that’s known for having all partners who are over six-foot.

Jason Calacanis
He writes a blog once like, every two months, but when he does it’s really good.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah it’s very insightful on this subject.

Natali Del Conte
I saw Android running on a e-reader again at i-stage, which is the launch event for CEA into their CES show. And liked this one a lot. I think it spoke to your point, it was called the eDGe and it was running Android and it had one screen was e-ink and the other was a netbook tablet. There was no keyboard but you could double-clink on the text on the left side and it would either launch a video on the other side, whatever the author wanted you to see, it would launch a hyperlink…

Leo Laporte
So it’s kind of a hybrid thing.

Natali Del Conte
Yeah, it was really immersive, I liked it a lot, a friend of mine called it a never-ending story kind of experience because you can take the existing story and then augment it with video or audio or whatever, a dictionary. It was nice.

Leo Laporte
All the stuff is converging in such a way that now we are seeing amazing creativity. We got developers who are getting it, we’ve got a convergence of internet, the cheap small hardware, and we are getting some really interesting uses of all these stuff. That’s very innovative I think.

Natali Del Conte
Yeah, I think so too. It’s going to amount to manufacturing at this point because it’s a beautiful device but they have to get it right, and they have to make sure that it’s going to launch in – in at CES in January but it’ll cost over $400, which is too much for a device a like that.

Leo Laporte
Yeah; that’s the problem.

Jason Calacanis
So what do you think Leo, in terms of the market share of Android?

Leo Laporte
I think if I were a developer, if I were that 14 year old kid we were talking about, I’d be writing for Android; I’d be learning Android right now. I think this is the way to go and I think that Google is not going to sit still until Android is everywhere.

Jason Calacanis
Right. And all that competition in the hardware space has got to lead to a better product than iPhone perhaps or products that would be more…?

Leo Laporte
Well this is what we are waiting for, for a whole year they were stuck with this crappy G1 hardware.

Natali Del Conte
Right.

Leo Laporte
Now they’ve got some decent hardware and we are just going to be – I think we are just going to start seeing this snowball. And I think – and I’ve twittered this, and I sense a backlash against Apple. People are starting to turn a little bit against to Apple, they are feeling a little bit like Apple has become the big monopoly that Microsoft used to be…

Natali Del Conte
They are the Yankees.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, they are the Yankees all of a sudden.

Natali Del Conte
They are.

Jason Calacanis
Hey, easy, easy on the Yankees.

Leo Laporte
Did the Yankees win last night? Boy, they sure turned it around, huh?

Natali Del Conte
Yah, it was kind of ugly.

Jason Calacanis
Yes, turned it around again. The Yankees win again…

Leo Laporte
It’s not over yet.

Natali Del Conte
Not at all.

Jason Calacanis
For the Yankees it’s over.

Natali Del Conte
No. I think we got [indiscernible] (39:25) World Series there.

Jason Calacanis
If they were playing the Angels, it wouldn’t be over, but if they are playing the Yankees; it’s over.

Leo Laporte
Hey, did you – anybody watch the – last Sunday, after TWiT, I was working a little bit late and I turned on YouTube and I saw, oh YouTube, U2 is doing a concert on YouTube Live! from the Rose Bowl, I watched a couple hours, never buffered, perfect quality…

Jason Calacanis
Unbelievable.

Leo Laporte
I don’t know how many they served. They didn’t – they aren’t saying…

Jason Calacanis
Ten million.

Leo Laporte
Well they are being cagy, 10 million during the entire concert, I don’t know how many any one time, right?

Leo Laporte
That’s got to be a record. The last – the biggest number I’ve ever heard was Live 8 and AOL did 180,000.

Natali Del Conte
Right. They did pat themselves on the back and said it was the biggest live streaming concert that’s ever [indiscernible] (40:06)

Leo Laporte
But they are not being – they are not being – they are not saying exactly what the peak number was, but still, yeah, it’s got to be half a million if you got 10 million people in two hours, it’s got to be a million, it’s going to be two million.

Jason Calacanis
It was so impressive.

Natali Del Conte
I believe the Foo Fighters did it just a few days ago as well and they didn’t even come close to that.

Leo Laporte
The quality, how do hey do it? I mean I thought you – I just – now, I should point out the reason I bring it up is we are blown away and rightly so. I mean this is streaming internet video, beautiful quality, millions of simultaneous views, but that pales to the number people that watched the World Series last night or will watch Monday night football tomorrow night. You are still far away from TV capability.

Jason Calacanis
Give it time. No, no, no, no, no, no. We are not far away from TV; ten million people coming to see something, how many unique? Let’s just say two, three million unique or whatever, I don’t know maybe they are touting ten million unique…

Leo Laporte
No, they are not saying uniques.

Jason Calacanis
If you think about it on a global basis. If you could put U2 or the Super Bowl or any of these things on TV, it’s going to be huge. I mean, this – we are going to have a global market for watching things that has never existed. And when you think about Twitter, how did you find out about the U2 concert? I found out on Twitter.

Leo Laporte
Probably, yeah.

Jason Calacanis
Everybody found out on Twitter. Twitter is the new TV guide now, I mean twitter is where you find out what to watch.

Leo Laporte
Twitter is not just – TV guide would be diminishing Twitter’s value. Twitter – I’ve said it’s the internet – it’s the internet nervous system is what it really is. It’s how – it’s the signaling system for the entire internet now.

Jason Calacanis
Correct. And one of the functions is, hey, everybody watch this.

Leo Laporte
Right. Huge.

Jason Calacanis
And that’s never existed before; everybody watch this now and boom! Trending topic, YouTube.

Leo Laporte
It’s true, Natali brought down our streaming by tweeting that she is going to be on TWiT; the streaming went down.

Jason Calacanis
I just had ten people tell me the same thing. I tweeted in, and everyone was like ‘it took ten tries to get on!’

Leo Laporte
It went down. So got to go talk to YouTube. Okay. I mean I don’t think we have 10 million people trying to watch although with Natali on it could be, but it’s really interesting. I think that we are headed towards that convergence, I just wonder how long before the capability is there.

Jason Calacanis
And when did YouStream say they were going to be, when did YouStream – when did YouTube say they were going to be YouStream? When did they say they were going to be a streaming Company?

Natali Del Conte
They said that over a year ago.

Jason Calacanis
Right.

Natali Del Conte
It’s been at least a year and a half.

Leo Laporte
Maybe this is what they meant though; maybe they didn’t mean for everybody anytime.

Natali Del Conte
Right. I think they’re just kind of testing it.

Jason Calacanis
Well, if they can do it for YouTube they can probably…

Natali Del Conte
You know when you just test it, you don’t test it with U2; one of the most popular rock bands ever. You think they would test it …

Leo Laporte
It’s not a test.

Natali Del Conte
Right.

Leo Laporte
It’s – That’s the real deal.

Natali Del Conte
Let’s see if we can just get U2 on – although, and thinking about this Twitter nervous system that you are talking about, I think, not to jump ahead too far in the stories, but this Twitter lists are a way to filter out the noise and it just starts to…

Leo Laporte
Let’s – all right, we are going to take a break, let’s talk about lists, I really think that a good subject, and I do want to get to that, you know, I think Patrick Norton is ready to join us…

Patrick Norton
Hey.

Leo Laporte
There he is, so when we come back Patrick Norton and Twitter Lists, we continue with Natali Del Conte, her first time with me on TWiT but second time on TWiT and Jason Calacanis in just a little bit. But before we do that I do want to talk about our friendly sponsors from the folks at Citrix and GoToMeeting. Do you ever use GoToMeeting Jason for your…

Jason Calacanis
Of course.

Leo Laporte
You know, we were going to – I was going to steal your idea, the TechCrunch 50 idea, and we were going to do the TWiT 12…

Jason Calacanis
Do it.

Leo Laporte
And, oh yeah, with GoToMeeting…

Jason Calacanis
Sure.

Leo Laporte
And we were going to have 12 people who had a good idea come on and they had to use GoToMeeting to demonstrate it.

Jason Calacanis
Perfect idea!

Leo Laporte
I think it’d be so much fun.

Jason Calacanis
Great idea, and ironically for TechCrunch 50, we use GoToMeeting and I do about 250 meetings…

Leo Laporte
Whoa!

Jason Calacanis
In the course of two weeks, and we do about 500 meetings over that period and they are all virtual, or 90% of them and they all use GoToMeeting, boom. I mean some people use some of the other products, but it’s majority GoToMeeting, and I can tell you it works flawlessly.

Leo Laporte
Yes, I won’t let anybody use it, I won’t do a meeting with anything but GoToMeeting, I’m pretty spoiled. We got a special deal, you can try it free. So here is the deal, with GoToMeeting, you set it up, you can set it up before the show is over, just by going to gotomeeting.com/twit, it’ll take you two minutes; once it’s on your system the next time you are on a conference call and you are saying boy this is boring, I’m going to sleep, you suddenly bring it alive by saying, all right, everybody, let’s go to gotomeeting.com, here is the meeting ID. Now they are seeing your computer, or you are seeing theirs, you can switch it back and forth, you can collaborate together on single product, you could do product demos, you could do training sessions, you could do sales presentations fast in real time securely, you get free phone and Voice over IP conferencing and I want you to try it free for 30 days, gotomeeting.com; gotoMeeting.com/twit, it is – you know there are other online meeting solutions but this is the one, there is just no question about it.

Jason Calacanis
If you are serious about business you use that one and it’s free so just go try it, and you’ll see, that’s worth it; it’s not that expensive anyway but it’s one of those that’s just well worth it.

Leo Laporte
Oh yes, every penny, we have three or four accounts now, because we have our hosts using it. All right, let me get Patrick Norton in here, I have to press a button or two because I have to change the configuration of the [ph] Frametz Rod (45:29)…

Natali Del Conte
Hello, Patrick Norton.

Leo Laporte
Yes, the [ph] Frametz Rod (45:22), he is going to…

Jason Calacanis
Yes, that’s what she said.

Leo Laporte
It’s going to be on number 6 left, all right, here we go, Patrick Norton, say hello. Now, he is not saying anything. What are you being so quiet for? Are you there Patrick?

Patrick Norton
I turned the mute on, so my horrible nasal breathing didn’t come over the line and so my clever technical accuracy is taking the out once again. Sorry, I didn’t see an email yesterday, so I figured you were booked up and then I…

Leo Laporte
Oh, no, no, we wanted you.

Patrick Norton
We got the text message and like put down the baby and grabbed the…

Leo Laporte
Put down the baby, grabbed the old ladies, everybody go.

Patrick Norton
My parents are in town, so they are actually getting more full-on baby time, so.

Leo Laporte
Well, Natali brought her mom to the studio in case…

Natali Del Conte
Yeah, my parents are in town too.

Leo Laporte
We needed babysitting.

Natali Del Conte
But they live here.

Leo Laporte
Patrick, you know Natali Del Conte I’m sure?

Natali Del Conte
Yes, we used to work on the same floor.

Patrick Norton
I used to work right next to her.

Leo Laporte
Aha!

Natali Del Conte
Our cubicles shared a wall; we both faced each other.

Leo Laporte
Did he ever punch a hole in that wall?

Natali Del Conte
No, he never punched a hole in the wall.

Leo Laporte
Then you didn’t know him that well.

Natali Del Conte
But, yes, but I could hear him. I could hear him ranting…

Patrick Norton
I punched one cabinet – there is one cabinet punching incident…

Natali Del Conte
Was I there for that?

Patrick Norton
And I went and apologized to everyone in the room, that I went to the person that was responsible for my ire and their manager and we resolved the issue; it resolved stories being stolen from the ScreenSavers for an unprepared show…

Leo Laporte
There you go.

Patrick Norton
To fill their time because they had no one to write for them.

Leo Laporte
You had every right to. And I’ll never forget the dented look of that cabinet to the end of its days…

Natali Del Conte
My dad likes to say that you should lose your cool about once or twice a year so people know what you are made of.

Leo Laporte
You know what, I think he is right.

Natali Del Conte
What you are capable of.

Patrick Norton
Adamantium, thank you.

Leo Laporte
I think he is absolutely right. I think that’s very good.

Natali Del Conte
Just completely lose it. I haven’t done it yet this year, so maybe today will be the day.

Leo Laporte
I can’t…

Jason Calacanis
[Indiscernible] (47:02) in the show.

Leo Laporte
I can’t imagine you losing your cool, I mean what do you look like when you lose your cool? Do you like do you turn bright red?

Natali Del Conte
Like this.

Jason Calacanis
Fiery.

Natali Del Conte
I just cry. I am just a stupid girl.

Leo Laporte
I don’t think that’s what dad meant.

Natali Del Conte
No.

Leo Laporte
I hate to say it.

Natali Del Conte
I’m still working on how to lose my cool effectively.

Leo Laporte
I watched The Last Detail last night, Jack Nicholson teaching Randy Quaid how to lose his cool. It’s a great moment.

Patrick Norton
It’s a beautiful moment.

Leo Laporte
Yes.

Patrick Norton
It’s one of Randy Quaid’s greatest acting moments, not that there are so many of them, but – I love you Randy. I’m just saying that was his…

Leo Laporte
No, this was his movie; yeah, no that was a wonderful movie, I haven’t seen that in ages.

Patrick Norton
Actually speaking of like getting really angry, you guys may have talked about this already but Jason how is the war against the scumbags going?

Jason Calacanis
Actually really good; the…

Leo Laporte
Why don’t you set this up, yes, so people know what you are talking about?

Jason Calacanis
All right, so for background, I had a couple of companies from TechCrunch 50 call me and say, listen should I do this Keiretsu Forum, should I do this Mike Segal thing in New York, where you say and then you present to angel investors, and I said, ‘what?’ And they said, ‘yes, you know, you pay and then you get to talk to rich people who might invest in your company.’ I’m like, I’m sorry, ‘I know all the top angel investors in the world, they don’t charge you to pitch them, they want to hear pitches because…’

Patrick Norton
They make money off of you in the long run.

Jason Calacanis
They make money if they invest in your company, it’s like they are – you are doing them a service by giving them the opportunity to invest in your company; I invested in GDGT, trust me they didn’t pay me to pitch, I chased Peter and Ryann, and said, for two years I said, ‘whatever your next company I’m going to angel invest, let me be the first investor, let me be the first investor, let me be the first investor.’ And for this – and I have don’t that with a couple of things; with Jack Dorsey, who is the Twitter founder, who is doing this new payment system on iPhone, I’ve got like three e-mails sent to him like, listen, save me a little spot, I really would love to be involved.

And so, long story short, these DBs, you know what that stand for, these DBs are…

Leo Laporte
Dumbbells?

Jason Calacanis
Yeah, dumbbells, second word is bags, and the first word is, yes.

Natali Del Conte
Rhymes with ‘ruche.’

Jason Calacanis
Yeah; rhymes with ‘ruche.’

Patrick Norton
Stuff. [indiscernible] (49:11) stuff.

Jason Calacanis
Anyway, they were charging $1,500 to present for like 10 minutes to a bunch of angel investors so the guy who is a former employee sends me – a former employee sends me a whole email saying like listen I worked there, it’s a scam. It’s filled with a bunch of lawyers and consultants and you shouldn’t do it. And not only it’s $1,500, but you have to do four chapters so it’s really $6,000. So I say listen you shouldn’t do this – I’m on this WEEK in STARTUPS and I am giving a bunch of advise people don’t do it, don’t do it.

Anyway so then they – one of their guys starts it mixing up with me and said, ‘listen you want me to go on a jihad against this, I will.’ And so basically I started a jihad and I said I am going to destroy this thing and I demanded that they drop the fees or I would launch a competing product in 30 days that would be free. And so anyway a week after I gave them the ultimatum they start calling Sequoia Capital, my investors and they start emailing them and CCing me – all these different people and threatening a lawsuit. This is not good for me to have people calling my VC, right? And long story short they dropped the fees.

Leo Laporte
Good for you. Now I read an interesting post by a British angel who explained why they charged and he said, well you want to make sure that people are committed, you’d be surprised –

Jason Calacanis
Bullshit. Sorry.

Leo Laporte
That’s okay, no, no, I am glad to hear you.

Jason Calacanis
54 minutes in, put a beep.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, no that’s all right.

Jason Calacanis
It’s B.S. That is the lamest excuse. They said it is to filter, guess what. A lot of the best companies were started by people who broke, Larry and Sergey were broke, they weren’t going to pay somebody.

Leo Laporte
Right, how are they going to ¬– yeah. He also says, here, I’ll give you the rest of them, he says, we help them, we work on their presentation, we polish it, we put a lot of effort into that, that costs money.

Jason Calacanis
I do two weeks of preparation with the TechCrunch50 companies; I don’t get paid for it. Again, they are doing this as a scam. It’s a same as people who charge – you go to become a model and they are like, oh Natalie you are so beautiful.

Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis
We need to send you to modeling classes, they are going to be $1,300 and we need to get headshots, they are going to be $1,700…

Leo Laporte
Right.

Jason Calacanis
…you take a makeup class for $1,400. But you are going to be…

Natali Del Conte
So I should not do that then?

Jason Calacanis
You are going to be the next Kate Moss, I am telling you, you have it. Trust me, like – or when you – you need acting lessons or coaching lessons – that’s B.S., it’s just a way to scam people who are desperate out of their money and as a guy who had to fight my way in and I took personal offense to it and now I have destroyed them because they said last week they weren’t going to charge companies with under $500,000 in revenue or raising money whatever, the fees. And there’s a couple more of these groups and I am going to specifically target them and I am going to put them out of business.

Leo Laporte
Good.

Jason Calacanis
Or they can drop the fees and I’ll give them credit. So I give Keiretsu half credit for dropping half the fees essentially, but it’s not going to – I am going to stop until they don’t – and you know what it’s over now because all the entrepreneurs know it’s a scam. And I told everybody who is doing it you need to – all the entrepreneurs, if anybody ask you if you should do this tell them outright it’s a scam. And so now they have no customers.

Leo Laporte
I was a little shocked actually to hear it; I thought ‘they charge to pitch? That seems odd.’

Jason Calacanis
It’s a whole undercurrent of smarmy people. There is one guy in New York Segal, Mike Segal, people were sending me like email after email from him. ‘I can talk to you about raising money, I need your credit card number, it’s going to be $1,000 for me to have a phone call with you and then I want between $5,000 and $15,000 and [ph] one in 10% (52:38) of your company to help you raise money.

Natali Del Conte
Wow!

Jason Calacanis
And this guy who I know who was a former, whatever, is somebody I know did it because he was desperate…

Leo Laporte
Oh, that’s sad.

Jason Calacanis
…and he presented and he said he went to present; there were no investors there, it was all people who were like lawyers. He said everybody afterwards came up to me and started to – sell me services, lawyers, headhunters, real estate agents, accountants…

Leo Laporte
So basically you pay to be a little fish in a shark tank.

Natali Del Conte
To pitch to someone’s mom or whatever.

Jason Calacanis
Exactly, you know all that – you know all the angel investors, you know these guys, Ron Conway and Kevin Rose, does angel investing now once in a while and Jay Adelson.

Leo Laporte
I thought that was interesting, Is’ve seen a number of investments that Kevin has made.

Jason Calacanis
Yeah, he’ll put 25k into something…

Leo Laporte
Oh that’s cool.

Jason Calacanis
And his name and…

Leo Laporte
His name is valuable of course.

Jason Calacanis
Right, that’s what I always do. I’m like hey, you know you got my Twitter, you got my email newsletter, I am going to help you out as best as I can if I can invest, and it’s a privilege to me to invest in these companies, because all I need is one out of 30 to become the next anything good Twitter, Google or whatever and I am golden.

Leo Laporte
Little do we know Patrick…

Natali Del Conte
Can I put my name somewhere without any money, as an angel investor?

Leo Laporte
Yeah, I’ll give them the name – little do we know Patrick that little guy Kevin came along that someday he’d be an angel. We should have been…

Patrick Norton
Good for him, man.

Leo Laporte
You should be nicer to him. Should never punched that – oh never mind.

Patrick Norton
You are the one who punched him.

Leo Laporte
Oh I didn’t punch him hard.

Patrick Norton
How held him when he cried?

Leo Laporte
That’s right, I held him when he cried. Let’s talk about Twitter lists, because I think it’s very – a big – it’s probably the biggest single change to the Twitter interface since the @ sign, maybe even more important than the @ sign and it completely eliminates the power of the suggested users list; it puts that power into the hands of everybody, of users.

Patrick Norton
That’s like saying, replacing one nuclear bomb with 10,000 AK-47s, takes the power away from the nuclear bomb, I mean you can do a lot of with AK-47s but it’s still not going to have the same impact.

Jason Calacanis
But they may get rid of the suggested user list…

Leo Laporte
They ought to, now.

Jason Calacanis
They should.

Natali Del Conte
Well I think that’s what Ev said…

Leo Laporte
He realized it’s junky, that it was a mistake.

Natali Del Conte
Right. But this is just a new way to present the cool kids list I think. I mean, it’s definitely useful…

Leo Laporte
But who presents it. You do.

Natali Del Conte
You do.

Leo Laporte
So it’s who you say is cool and I think that’s much more valuable that somebody – some faceless person at Twitter.

Natali Del Conte
Yeah I agree, and you are going to get much more engaged followers rather than…

Leo Laporte
Have you made lists yet?

Natali Del Conte
I have made lists. I got to say I didn’t like…

Leo Laporte
It’s hard to do.

Natali Del Conte
…classifying people that way because no one is completely mutually exclusive in any of those lists, well some people. Decidedly not my family.

Leo Laporte
So everybody has lists now.

Natali Del Conte
Right.

Leo Laporte
So I think [ph] to kind of see it. (55:20) So you’ve got news organizations, interesting, influencing, friends, companies, colleagues, co-workers. See at first you look at this and you think, oh this is for me; this is an organizational feature for me, but it isn’t.

Natali Del Conte
Right.

Leo Laporte
I mean you could use it that way.

Natali Del Conte
I sort of use it for me but there’s not a client that’s going to filter just those lists yet.

Leo Laporte
Right.

Natali Del Conte
I mean I can use that way.

Leo Laporte
Well you can, you can click and you’ll see everybody who’s on that – that now is a stream of just those people.

Natali Del Conte
Right.

Leo Laporte
So that you can – you’re right, no third-party clients do it, but Twitter does it.

Natali Del Conte
They will, I am sure.

Leo Laporte
Gosh, they’ll all do it.

Natali Del Conte
I am sure they will very soon.

Leo Laporte
Have you made lists Patrick?

Patrick Norton
Not quite yet, I am so trying to decide that this is more of a search engine tool than anything – or a search to promote rankings and distribution in search engines more than anything else.

Leo Laporte
It is. I think it’s exactly that. I think what it is, is authority. It’s giving – it’s a way of ranking authority. So for instance now, it shows that Patrick Norton is on 1,253 lists.

Patrick Norton
Cool!

Leo Laporte
That is a number of value, right? That says Patrick is valued by that many people. I think this is the new number, forget Followers.

Patrick Norton
So it’s $5 to tweet me now?

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Natali Del Conte
And I think it’s really funny to see the way that people name you on your lists, like all of my – the lists that people put me on are geek, tech, nerd, that kind of –

Leo Laporte
– did very intelligently is, you can see the – whose lists you’re on. So if you go to click the listed thing, this is all the people who – you’re a tech tweeps, tech tweeters, most influential in tech, geek, tech, yeah, interesting people. And you can see also how many people are following those. Which I think is very interesting.

Natali Del Conte
Right.

Leo Laporte
What do you think, Jason?

Jason Calacanis
It’s a big deal, because you can tell somebody’s authority. You can tell who the spammers are instantly. Because if – you have to – if you appear on X number of lists and those lists are followed by X number of people past a certain standard deviation or whatever, you’re either extremely popular or you’re a nonexistent person, possibly a spammer, you know, so. When they – when you do a search, they can easily say by authority and...

Jason Calacanis
Right, I mean – so spammers will try to create lists of other spammers, and – but nobody’s going to follow those lists except other spammers and fake accounts. So now they can immediately do a cut-off. And imagine you do a search. You do a search for Yankees, and I say – you know what, I’ll just do a search for the new Android phone, and I move it over to Authority, and only people who appear on more than 100 lists, that have over 10 people following each list do I see. And now I can start to see, really these are the interesting people – whatever, that’s going to sound obnoxious, but these are the more authoritative figures.

Natali Del Conte
Right. And I think behaviorally, this is really helpful. Because a lot of times, I’ll wake up in the morning and only read 20 tweets back. And then I’m like, I don’t care to catch up, I’m just not going to do that. There’s an interesting term coined by David Levy, he’s a professor at The University of Washington, called ‘Information Environmentalism.’ It’s the way that we filter out all the noise to get to what we really want. And a lot of times, I think maybe there won’t ever be a technology to help us with that, beyond an RSS reader or a Twitter list. But it does seem that technology is becoming more keen at giving us the information that we want to know, in certain informational subsets.

Leo Laporte
And it’s with the help of humans.

Natali Del Conte
Yes.

Leo Laporte
I think that’s the key to it.

Patrick Norton
Yeah. That’s one of the things that’s been coming out in some of the conferences around online video distribution, is that in some ways, the evolving thing is edited collections of video, rather than pure random collections like YouTube. Or something that’s pretty obvious for people who follow YouTube traffic is that the cultivated pages or the posted pages or the homepages all tend to generate more traffic than somebody stumbling across your video in the giant collection of a billion videos that are floating around out there. It’s kind of interesting to watch it swing back, the pendulum kind of swings back and forth.

Leo Laporte
Yeah. Ah, Twitter, and it’s usual ability to bring –

Patrick Norton
Didn’t mean to kill the energy.

Leo Laporte
No, it’s not you, it’s Twitter, it just sucks the air right out of the room every single time. I don’t know why we still bring it up.

Here’s a good story, Google Voice. Google made a pdf that it sent to the FCC in response to the FCC action. But they did it wrong. And people were able to read – the pdf submitted to the Federal Communications Commission was improperly formatted, so people were able to read the redacted information!

Jason Calacanis
Ah, I love when people do that.

Leo Laporte
I love it. And so we now know –

Jason Calacanis
People do it with Microsoft Word and hidden columns in Excel.

Leo Laporte
Yup. Yup.

Patrick Norton
Yes. Genius.

Leo Laporte
Yup. We now know several things about Google Voice we didn’t know before. Business Week’s reporting that Google Voice now has 1.4 million users. This is still not a public service!

Patrick Norton
Wow. That’s significant.

Leo Laporte
40% of whom, half a million, use the service every day! I’ll include myself in that number.

Natali Del Conte
Yeah, I use it.

Leo Laporte
Google, also in the redacted section suggests that Google intends to take its voice service global, has linked deals with international service providers. Of course they’re not doing that yet, you have to be in the U.S. to use it. It’s pretty amazing that they screwed up the formatting of the pdf. You use Google Voice, Patrick, yet?

Patrick Norton
No, I –

Leo Laporte
I’ll send you an invite. It’s wonderful.

Patrick Norton
No, it’s less of a – a need for an invite than – anything that involves comms, I just use my iPhone and I don’t jailbreak my iPhone. You know, I should try it, but it’s just...

Leo Laporte
You don’t need to jailbreak it. You can use it without jailbreaking anything.

Patrick Norton
No, no, I know that. I guess what I’m saying is, it’s the one thing that I want to make sure, you know...

Leo Laporte
It’s reliable. I understand.

Patrick Norton
I’ve – I’ve –

Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, and the iPhone is so reliable, don’t you find?

Patrick Norton
Don’t even get me started. If it wasn’t for the 850 megahertz rollout, literally, I was shopping around and flipping coins to decide which of the other networks to go with. And I went from not being able to hold a call for five minutes to actually being able to hold calls in parts of the city that I’ve never actually had connectivity before. So I can’t – AT&T can’t roll out that nationwide fast enough.

Leo Laporte
Are you using Google Voice, Mr. Calacanis?

Jason Calacanis
I signed up for it and I’m not currently using it, because it was a weird phone number and I guess I got to forward my phone number to it…

Leo Laporte
Now you can get your phone number. They’ve added number portability, so.

Jason Calacanis
Yeah, I’m going to think about doing that. But right now I have the SimulScribe which is a human being [inaudible] (1:01:54).

Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, we’ve been using that. And they’re the phone type folks. That works really, really well.

Jason Calacanis
And somebody writes it, and so – compared to the [ph] translate they have – (1:02:09) and I need this, because I don’t like picking up my phone, because I get a range of phone calls, my number’s out there.

Leo Laporte
Right.

Jason Calacanis
And it’s great, because I’ll get something, somebody’s pitching me on a technology, I forward it to my CTO.

Leo Laporte
They set us up with a phone number for Mac Break Weekly, we’ve been using it – it’s always – they’re very accurate transcriptions. Unlike Google Voice.

Leo Laporte
It’s a great game to go to your Google Voice account and look at the text – let me see if I can do this without giving out anybody’s phone number.

Patrick Norton
Don’t do it, Leo, don’t do it!

Leo Laporte
My sister – I know, I can’t – I’m zooming in as best I can, but there’s no way –

Jason Calacanis
Is that Steve Job’s iPhone? What?

Leo Laporte
My sister calls. Hi, Maria – okay, that’s not my name, obviously, and I think my sister knows that. With even I know you are very busy and I just want to know if you want to do fees sometime this week or you think that Dan should do it, I don’t know what she is talking about.

Jason Calacanis
You probably shouldn’t be feesing with her.

Leo Laporte
yeah I am feesing with her. It’s pretty funny. Some of these are just hysterical and yet there is enough there. It’s really a game to figure out what they are talking about, there is enough there that you could figure it out.

Patrick Norton
Just what I want when I am working with delicate and important communications. It’s like that cell phone moment where you are in the critical moment in the conversation with the girlfriend or boyfriend or soon to be ex or spouse or soon to be ex spouse where the phone cuts out.

Natali Del Conte
Right at crucial moment.

Patrick Norton
And you call them back and they’re even more pissed off.

Leo Laporte
Well, there is a feature on Google Voice that I like but confused my wife no end; you can – you have your contacts and you can have a different outbound message for every contact. So I have friends, I have family. And in the family message it says love you bye, because it’s only going to my kids and my wife. But my wife calls, gets this message she says do you tell everybody who leaves a message with you that you love them?

Natali Del Conte
Well, but it takes it from that number so if someone else calls you from your home phone they are going to get that love you message.

Leo Laporte
Oh, I didn’t think of that. You are right, it’s numbered.

Natali Del Conte
Because any number that – and it doesn’t let you try again like there are people who will call me and it will say at the tone say your name and Google Voice will try and reach Natali, and then there is that tone and people are like ‘what the heck is this?!’

Leo Laporte
I get a lot of those.

Natali Del Conte
And then –and so you pick up and that says will you take a call from, ‘what the heck is this?!’ And then that person is like oh I didn’t understand it. And then that person calls again; they never get to do that again from that phone number…

Leo Laporte
Right.

Natali Del Conte
So every time that person calls I get a call from ‘what the heck?!’

Leo Laporte
What the heck. Oh, technology.

Natali Del Conte
So I will not call you from your home number because again the lawyer thing.

Jason Calacanis
The big picture is that now with this product and with Gmail and with Calendar this is going to be their leverage to get you to get one login and all of a sudden all your information is on your phone, you are done. Synchronizing the cloud.

Leo Laporte
Well, they did that with the Pre, but of course it does it with the Android phones, it does it with Droid, it does it with the iPhone now too. So when people call me on the radio show and say ‘I can’t get my calendar’ I just say ‘put everything on Google and forget it.’

Natali Del Conte
Yeah.

Jason Calacanis
Yes, set and forget.

Leo Laporte
You are – I am – we are slaves to Google. Hey here is one for you Mr. Jason Calacanis, Microsoft…

Jason Calacanis
[indiscernible] (65:30)

Leo Laporte
Microsoft and Yahoo! delay signing search deal.

Jason Calacanis
Hello! Yeah; no big deal.

Leo Laporte
It’s the endless story that we thought had an end and now it doesn’t.

Jason Calacanis
I told you for number one, I told Dvorak this would get done. And he was like ‘No, it’s never going to get done!’

Leo Laporte
He did, a year and a half ago.

Jason Calacanis
I said ‘it has to get done.’

Leo Laporte
Dvorak’s verging on accurate at this point, they still – I mean come on.

Jason Calacanis
I know, I mean they should – if just to shut him up they should do the deal. ‘Ah, you see because it’s not done. If it was done, that would be done. Thank god it’s not done’

Leo Laporte
Carol Bartz, we beg you. Just shut up John and get – sign the deal. Oh that’s so funny.

Jason Calacanis
No, they signed the deal, they rushed to do it, because they wanted to – you know, Google needed to do this – I mean Yahoo! needed to do this, because they need to save face and get their company back on track. I mean their stock price has gone up actually since doing this. And I think Carol Bartz is not product person. And so I think it’s mistake to put a non-product person in charge of a company like this. That’s just me.

Leo Laporte
I just love her take no prisoners attitude though.

Jason Calacanis
I do like that about her. So I mean, she not a wet noodle and she has a spine and she’s tough. So hopefully that will work out for her and she can get great product people in there, but man did they screw up. I mean if you think about what’s they could have done…

Leo Laporte
So sad, so sad.

Jason Calacanis
They could have – this is what I would have done if I were CEO. I mean this is…

Leo Laporte
But it’s not over for them. I mean –

Jason Calacanis
No, I mean they still have over 400 million people globally.

Leo Laporte
They’re huge. Look what they did with EnGadget I mean – oh that’s AOL, never mind.

Jason Calacanis
That’s ALO, but anyway

Leo Laporte
Have another glass of wine Leo.

Jason Calacanis
Yes. Anyway, they are – they can still do great things if they have product people. But if you think the moment in time a couple years ago when they had Caterina from Flickr and Josh from Delicious there. I mean they had some of the best brands in the world and they didn’t embrace them and use them to build great product and they should have –

Patrick Norton
And they still haven’t monetized either product, have they?

Leo Laporte
No, no.

Jason Calacanis
I mean both those products are still of the most loved, some of the most love Yahoo! products.

Patrick Norton
Yes, no doubt. I’m just saying like the, you know what I mean, it’s one of those things where you’re like are they ever going to monetize these? They’ve got this traffic, they have this community, everybody is infested, everybody lives on it, and it’s like…

Jason Calacanis
Yes, but imagine they properly motivate those two individuals. And if you said to Caterina like, okay you know what you’re doing with images, do with again with video, do it again with blogs.

Leo Laporte
Yes.

Jason Calacanis
You get Josh Schachter and you say Josh, look at the search and do something huge with search. And get them involved. And you know it they just – they had all this great assets there and they didn’t leverage it. So maybe because she is just a strong leader and she’s got the company going in right direction and she has the support of the Board, and she has a currency that’s worth a lot of money, she can go invest or buy a lot of the great companies out there. Go buy Digg, go buy it, and let Kevin Rose work on some of these products and make him chief product officer; that’s the kind of bold thing they need to do.

Leo Laporte
That’s good idea, yeah.

Jason Calacanis
And maybe she is the type of person who’s not going to sit there and go, ‘what? We’re going to put Kevin Rose in charge?’ or whatever. But that’s how they think, these people.

Leo Laporte
Do they have the cash now? And they in a good enough cash position they could go on a buying spree.

Jason Calacanis
Of course. They have stock; even better, you know, you just – stock and cash.

Leo Laporte
Undervalued stock perhaps?

Jason Calacanis
Exactly, that stock could be worth more. So – and AOL is coming in to the market so what you’re going to see when AOL goes public in December-January timeframe, you’re going to have Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft and AOL are going to on a buying frenzy and all the start-ups that you love now that are independent companies, you’re going to start seeing them get bought up real quick. And Facebook will be going public in 20 months, and when they public and Zynga’s going to go public. You’re going to see massive, massive amounts of acquisitions and the third age of the web.

Jason Calacanis
There is little – yes there is little upside to going public early now because you can get cash from other places. Remember people used to raise 20 million, 30 million, 40 million, 50 million, a 100 million in an IPO. Well what did Twitter just raise? $100 million.

Jason Calacanis
That’s – I raised 20 million for Mahalo; you don’t need to IPO now. There’s plenty of sources where you can do it, and guess what? You know Bloomberg’s got a company that’s worth billions of dollars that’s private; it’s okay to be private, it’s okay to be illiquid if there is M&A activity going on and the companies are worth a lot of money. But that being said, these companies are getting too big with too much revenue; cannot do it. So Facebook and Twitter, and Zynga…

Leo Laporte
They have to spend, you say?

Jason Calacanis
Those three companies Facebook, Twitter and Zynga will be public and they’re going to be the next Yahoo, Google, Microsofts.

Leo Laporte
I don’t understand what is – why do they have to go public?

Jason Calacanis
Because when they have that currency, stock, you can do a lot of interesting things. You can get a lot of capital and you can acquire things…

Leo Laporte
But unless the stock is freely traded it doesn’t – it’s hard to – it’s not currency.

Jason Calacanis
Yes, and so you think about employees, if you have these employees and they can’t sell their stock at Facebook and they are getting tired, and they want money, and okay, I’ve been at Facebook now for three, four, five years and I was suppose to be able to buy a house and a car at some point.

Leo Laporte
Got it.

Jason Calacanis
It gets a little tired…

Leo Laporte
You can’t hire, you can’t…

Patrick Norton
What if they just pay them well and give them good – I am just saying, a share of profits –

Jason Calacanis
It never [indiscernible] (1:10:44)

Leo Laporte
No, no that will never work, it’ll never work.

Jason Calacanis
I mean, Google pays extremely well but people were there for the stock options and the major run-up when you get – you can get people to work 50 hours a week, 60 hours a week with cash.

Patrick Norton
I thought that was just Microsoft –

Jason Calacanis
But you can get people or the top people to work 80 hours a week.

Patrick Norton
Once Microsoft topped out – once Microsoft topped out they could no longer use – options become less of an intriguing bonus because then maybe you get a down payment on the house but you are not going to retire with millions in the bank. I mean, at some point companies, are companies are going to live on the whole stock option lifestyle forever? Or are they ever going actually take care of their employees’ long term the way adult companies do, or old school companies.

Jason Calacanis
It depends on the – if the value of the company’s is increasing, when you become like Microsoft and the value of the company is not increasing anymore or it’s not increasing greatly…

Patrick Norton
Correct.

Jason Calacanis
… that’s when you have the problem. But when you have a company like Facebook, or Zynga or Twitter where the value is growing; every year it doubles or triples, the value of the company, then people would rather get the stock and they would rather have the chance to hit the home run, and you know, people can choose. If you are a developer right how, you can choose to be at Google or Microsoft, a blue-chip company or you can choose to be at Zynga or Twitter or Facebook and risk the stock. I mean, we live in the greatest country in the world, still, despite all the screw-ups.

Patrick Norton
I am not arguing that. In your example somebody who’s swung and made it several times but most people who take stock options, they end up with a pile of worthless paper, under paid with bad health insurance.

Leo Laporte
Patrick and I are shinning examples of that by the way, I just want to point out.

Natali Del Conte
And how many times do we get hit on the head by this model with – this is – it could be Bust 3.0.

Leo Laporte
Well, we are not going to see another bust, are we, Jason? That was a once.

Patrick Norton
Not like that one, I hope.

Jason Calacanis
Every time they say there’s not going to be a bubble there is. There will be another bubble, it just won’t be in real estate or technology. The industry’s learned…

Leo Laporte
Right. So you don’t have the bubble in the same sector.

Jason Calacanis
Right. I mean, it was in…

Leo Laporte
We will never have a tulip bubble again.

Jason Calacanis
Right, people – what we will have is a biotech bubble at some point when you look at [indiscernible] (1:12:49).

Patrick Norton
Nanotech bubble.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, nanotech, yeah.

Jason Calacanis
Nano – I mean, what’s going on with nanotech and biotech is just, I mean This Week in Nanotech, will – when we collaborate on that one we’ll be huge.

Leo Laporte
It’s incredible, incredible.

Natali Del Conte
Or greentech. Greentech seems to –

Leo Laporte
Do you think?

Natali Del Conte
I don’t know. There seems to be a lot of green solutions these days that have me scratching my head that do seem like interim solutions, but people want to invest there.

Leo Laporte
Right.

Natali Del Conte
They want to talk about it.

Leo Laporte
I’d love to buy a green tech.

Jason Calacanis
I’d love to buy a nuclear power plant. That’s the solution. Obama is actually – Obama is a big nuclear fan. He sort of played it down during his presidential run and he was in Japan talking about how if France is 90% nuclear we need to look at that very seriously…

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Jason Calacanis
Which is basically his way of saying, ‘it’s on.’

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Jason Calacanis
We are going to build nuclear power plants in this country and there’s like a good number of them are under application review right now. And we haven’t built a new one since 1976 or 1977.

Leo Laporte
Now it’s time.

Jason Calacanis
And it’s time, trust me.

Leo Laporte
I am coming around because I wasn’t a big fan but I’m coming around.

Jason Calacanis
Listen, put it in my backyard; it’s fine with me.

Leo Laporte
It’s better than coal.

Jason Calacanis
These things are much safer now and it’s much safer than having a bunch of terrorists in the Middle East who want killing you and sending them bucket loads of money to hate you.

Leo Laporte

Yup.

Jason Calacanis
Trust me.

Leo Laporte
Facebook’s privacy policy went public on Thursday for your review and comment, not merely public, but your chance to say what you think. The statements of rights and responsibilities and they say we’re avoiding legal jargon that most sites typically put in their terms of service, it articulates our mutual relationship and shared obligations; we are doing the same with our privacy policy. It is in simple English; you can read it. Things like ‘when you update information, we usually keep a backup copy of the prior version for a reasonable period of time.’ Your content maybe viewable in cached or archived pages if they’ve done so, but access and control over most personal information is readily available through the profile editing tools.

I mean this is plain English. Natali, you’ve read it. What do you think, is this what they needed to do?

Natali Del Conte
I think so, I’ve had this argument on Buzz Out Loud with Brian Cooley before that EULAs need to become more user friendly because he thinks we just all should assume that no one reads that EULA, the end user agreement…

Leo Laporte
They don’t. But why don’t they?

Natali Del Conte
And that’s okay and that if we violate it, we can plead that we didn’t really read it.

Leo Laporte
No, you can’t.

Natali Del Conte
And I don’t think that that’s the case. I think that we should bring it into the vernacular of everyday use and allow other people to opine on it in order that we can really then be expected to uphold what we are clicking in agreement off.

Leo Laporte
Now this is an example of a company learning and learning fast because remember, they made those changes kind of unilaterally and people screamed. And Mark Zuckerberg had to pull it back and now they are coming back again with new policies and this time saying we want your comments ahead of time. It seems like they learned their lesson, Jason?

Jason Calacanis
It a smart PR move. I mean, if you screw up like three of four times, listening to your customers next time around, it’s pretty clear you’re learning.

Leo Laporte
Not a bad idea.

Jason Calacanis
Not a bad idea. Whoever’s running the PR there, good on you.

Leo Laporte
But you say it’s PR not, it’s not substantive.

Jason Calacanis
Nobody cares about privacy, I mean, that’s the sad part. At least not in this country. And the intelligentsia care but they are not allowed enough voice, and in Europe you have great oversight so they do things like, your phone bill gets deleted or you can say I don’t want my phone records kept. You can opt out all these things in the countries because they have very intelligent people who are able to pass regulation as opposed to companies which have bought and sold our governance like we do here in this country.

Of course their businesses run smaller and slower and ours bigger and faster and they take more advantage of us. So you can pick your poison, but nobody cares and the only time people will care is when their privacy is compromised. And it happens so infrequently that people don’t care. I mean, if you – if 10 years ago I told you the level of over-sharing going on Twitter and Facebook right now, you would not believe it.

Leo Laporte
I want to ask you if people care about net neutrality, I am going to talk about two new bills, there’s one in the House and one in Senate.

Patrick Norton
The Internet Freedom Act.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, that frees nothing --

Patrick Norton
Like [inaudible] (77:13)?

Leo Laporte
Yeah, except to set Comcast to do what it wants. We will talk about that in just a second. Before we do I want to remind everybody to back up and when you back up you got to do it right. You got to back up offsite. It’s not enough just to have a hard drive sit next to your computer that you back up on to – that’s a good start. I am glad you’re doing that.

But what happens if the worst happens, if fire, flood, tornado, earthquake or the bad guys come and take everything? That’s what happened to Francis Ford Coppola. He is living in Argentina. He’s backed up 20 years of scripts and materials. He’s smart. He says, I’m backing up, I got the external hard drive right here. What happens? The guys break into his house and steal the backups along with the computer. And he has lost 20 years of scripts.

Jason Calacanis
Godfather IV not happening.

Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, that’s a relief. It’s not all bad.

Jason Calacanis
Yeah, the [Indiscernible] (77:58).

Leo Laporte
It’s not all bad.

Jason Calacanis
Yeah, exactly. But you know what if there was a service where you could back up your computer offsite? I mean – but that would be too expensive, right?

Leo Laporte
Well, you know and automatically do it so you don’t have think about it, you just install – what if you could go to somewhere like, I don’t know, carbonite.com and use the offer code TWiT and try it for free. Yeah. That is so cool.

Jason Calacanis
Free.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, and you try it for free and it would just you know like automatically would find your photos, your emails, your financial documents, your music, all those stuff that you’ve been working so hard to collect and put together your lifetime on the hard drive and just back it up, just saying, no problem, I got it. And from now on it’s backing it up to the Internet. It’s encrypting it on your drive, encrypting it as it goes. So it’s private. It’s up there on the Internet. You can log on to any computer, anywhere to your Carbonite account and get the file.

What if there was such a thing as that? What if you wouldn’t have to worry about how much stuff you had because it was unlimited back up for less than $5 a month?

Jason Calacanis
Yeah, that would be something that will cost $1,000 a month.

Leo Laporte
So good. No, no, no, how about $5? How about better than $5? How about 54.95 a year? How about that?

Leo Laporte
It’s cheaper than that. No, I got to say, you can’t – it’s not every drive on your network. It’s not a hundred different external drives. It’s the drive in your computer. It’s great for a laptop by the way. Laptops are the first to go.

I can’t believe this. But this is from Harris Interactive Survey – no, I am sorry. This is from USA Today. 600,000 laptops are reported lost or stolen at U.S. airports every year. That’s 10,000 laptops a week.

Natali Del Conte
Gees!

Leo Laporte
Lost or stolen, most of those are never found again. That’s from the Ponemon Institute in Computerworld. 3% are recovered according to the FBI. So that’s – these guys if they have been using Carbonite they wouldn’t – no sweat. So I want to try it.

Look here, we talked about back up. Everybody believes in backup. Everybody plays lip-service to it. But it sometimes is just too hard to remember, too complicated. It costs too much. This is why I just want you to try Carbonite. Try it free for two weeks. Use my coupon code TWiT and you get it free for two – oh, you get two free months when you sign up to buy. So that’s a good deal. C A R B O N I T E, Carbonite.com, it’s back up done right.

Jason Calacanis
For $5 a month.

Leo Laporte
Less than.

Jason Calacanis
Less than – and I am just thinking about something. About a third of the TWiT listeners are probably suffering from anxiety and depression related to --

Leo Laporte
Yes.

Jason Calacanis
Losing data.

Leo Laporte
Yes.

Jason Calacanis
And it’s a lot more expensive to get yourself an anxiety/anti-depressant drug.

Leo Laporte
It’s the Sword of Damocles hanging over their head.

Jason Calacanis
It is. Do you ever have that like fear like at the middle of the night like oh, my God, I left my laptop in car. I wonder if it’s stolen I lost everything. You know I wonder if --

Leo Laporte
The other day I did that. I had my camera and my laptop in my car and I left it at work and I walked home. And I walked back to work to get it because I said I can’t – literally in the middle of the night --

Jason Calacanis
Can’t enjoy life.

Leo Laporte
Can’t enjoy life.

Jason Calacanis
With Carbonite you can.

Leo Laporte
Yup.

Jason Calacanis
That’s crazy.

Leo Laporte
How much would you pay to enjoy life?

Jason Calacanis
I mean $5 a month, you get a lot of enjoyment of your life, less depression.

Patrick Norton
It’s getting a little sick, guys.

Leo Laporte
He’s good, isn’t he? He’s good.

Patrick Norton
He’s good. I agree with everything everybody’s saying.

Leo Laporte
This guy should be a pitchman. I know --

Jason Calacanis
I just – I like to entertain myself, obviously.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, great, I love it.

Patrick Norton
Well, people always laugh, because like I always talk about off basically backing up out of the house and people are like, you’re such a pessimist, I’m like, I live in San Francisco. My family have been burned out of two homes. I have had my truck broken into and everything stolen. It’s like, one backup is one backup, you know? One backup and one backup offsite is a hell of a lot more reliable.

Jason Calacanis
What about all the zombies in San Francisco?

Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah.

Jason Calacanis
I mean I was driving around down there like 12 o’clock at night after TechCrunch, and it was like night of the living dead. There were hundreds of homeless people, drunk people, hipsters, I couldn’t tell the hipsters from the homeless. And they were walking around like – ahh, brains, laptops, ahh, you know – just walking through the street. And everybody I know who lives in San Francisco has had their apartment robbed, everybody.

Leo Laporte
Natali, you split your time between New York and San Francisco, right?

Natali Del Conte
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
Or you spend more time in New York?

Natali Del Conte
Yeah, I spend about a week a month or every other month here.

Leo Laporte
Which is worse?

Leo Laporte
Worse in terms of crime?

Leo Laporte
Yeah, just like zombies.

Jason Calacanis
San Francisco.

Natali Del Conte
Oh, where are the more zombies? More zombies are definitely on the New York City subway. Although I did usually when I rode Muni think that I was going to get bird flu.

Leo Laporte
There is something – there is people with birds actually on the bus.

Natali Del Conte
It’s true. Muni is lot weirder than the subway.

Leo Laporte
I don’t like it.

Jason Calacanis
The subway in New York functions. Muni is a really interesting and challenging….

Leo Laporte
Yeah, no, it’s not a good way to get around.

Natali Del Conte
I once saw a man with his whole head wrapped in duct tape with only slits for his eyes on Muni. I’ve never seen that on the subway. Although I did see a guy play with box-cutters on the subway recently.

Patrick Norton
But you also – I mean you also missed a lot of the great days in the New York subway before Giuliani got a ton more cops and made them get out of their cars – I know Jason is [indiscernible] (82:51)…

Natali Del Conte
Were there duct tape people then?

Patrick Norton
I’ve actually – I’ve seen drug use on the New York City subways, people having open fires in the New York City subway.

Leo Laporte
Hey, it gets cold in there, come on.

Patrick Norton
[Indiscernible] (83:04).

Jason Calacanis
I’ve seen people smoke crack on a subway car, yeah, I’ve walked into that. I mean there were times you would walk on a subway car in Manhattan, literally walk into the car and it smells so bad, you would walk out. This is during rush hour. There would be a car with like freaky [indiscernible] (83:16).

Patrick Norton
There’s nobody else, yeah.

Jason Calacanis
And nobody in it. And then the other cars will be packed, because the homeless people would smell so bad and they would have – you know – in the car and it’s unbelievable.

Natali Del Conte
Although I will say, I think technology changes the way we ride public transportation because it used to be a dude with a boom box and then that was what everyone was listening to. But now everyone in the subway is so heads-down, we all have some kind of –

Leo Laporte
Yeah, nobody knows what’s going on.

Natali Del Conte
MP3 or a media player, no eye contact, whatever, so no one is really motivated to be weird to each other.

Leo Laporte
Makes it hard to do flash mobs. I saw that there was that video of the twins, remember the mirror on the subway and nobody notices. You have to go, you notice, they’re the same on both sides? Yeah, yeah, whatever, I’m tweeting. I’m sorry. Don’t interrupt me. I’m tweeting.

Natali Del Conte
I can get data from this Motorola Droid in the subway…

Leo Laporte
Really?

Natali Del Conte
…which really is amazing because Verizon – every New Yorker agrees that Verizon has the best coverage in New York.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, they must have antennas in the tunnels.

Natali Del Conte
It’s crazy, yeah.

Jason Calacanis
No, they don’t. I mean why hasn’t that occurred yet? Why don’t they have antennas in every subway, can’t they get that sponsored?

Natali Del Conte
I don’t want anyone talking on the phone next to me in the subway. I’d give them a dirty look but…

Jason Calacanis
Why don’t they put free Wi-Fi in the entire subway and sponsor it, Google, is somebody from Google listening to the show? There is something you can do with all that money. Wi-Fi the fricking subway.

Leo Laporte
They have released the Apple iPod in China and the Chinese are so paranoid that they won’t let them put a Wi-Fi on the iPhone. They are scared of Wi-Fi for some reason.

Jason Calacanis
Absolutely. If you give people W-Fi, then they could actually do reporting.

Leo Laporte
You think – you think, so I get it. So they are more – but the 3G lets them do that, doesn’t it?

Jason Calacanis
I think it’s because they can’t, on a Wi-Fi network, listen in as easily because it’s encrypted. If you are on – they probably have tapped all of the regular phone networks.

Leo Laporte
They own the phone company!

Jason Calacanis
Right, so I mean they have got everything on lock down, but on Wi-Fi network maybe it’s encrypted. They – you’ve got a little bit too much freedom.

Natali Del Conte
And don’t you they have their own Wi-Fi standard there? They don’t want us using that standard. China likes to have their own broadband standards in general.

Jason Calacanis
I used Wi-Fi over there.

Natali Del Conte
Is it Wi-Fi or is it 3G?

Leo Laporte
I’ve used Wi-Fi over there too, yeah, but that might just be the hotels. They don’t have the same kind of penetration of hot spots in China for some reason but I suspect – I think you are right, Jason. I think it’s because they can’t control that as well.

Jason Calacanis
I think it has something to do with that.

Leo Laporte
Every Internet service provider in China is licensed by the government and they yank your – they can yank your license. They can do anything.

Jason Calacanis
They can also route. This is in the early days. I don’t know if this is still going on but they were – I had a VC tell me, they had made an investment there, this was, I don’t know, seven, eight years ago, and there was a competitor and in some region of the country they were redirecting the traffic from one website on an IP DNS basis to another website that was a competitor because somebody in the military’s son owned a different…

Leo Laporte
Oh geez.

Jason Calacanis
Gaming company. So you would be putting in like I want to play World of Warcraft, and it would be like no, you don’t, you’d like to play –

Leo Laporte
No, I am sorry. That wasn’t the game you were looking for.

Jason Calacanis
No.

Leo Laporte
So now both the Senate and the House have bills that would block the FCC from net neutrality rules. Senator McCain has a bill and now Representative Marcia Blackburn of Tennessee has introduced the Real Stimulus Act of 2009, that she calls it. It would prohibit the FFC from “needlessly imposing regulations on the Internet.” It sounds so good. It sounds so sensible. We don’t want the government regulating the Internet. The Internet is new, it’s entrepreneurial, it’s innovative, and government regulation would just slow that down.

Natali Del Conte
But this is the government telling the government not to do that.

Leo Laporte
Well, the FCC works by what the legislatures tell it. The bills says the FCC cannot “propose, promulgate or issue any regulations regarding the Internet or IP-enabled services.” This is a companion bill to McCain’s inaptly named Internet Freedom Act.

Now Jason, I want to….

Patrick Norton
No, it’s brilliantly named. That’s pure politics. That is absolute magnificent politics by a lifetime scrapper who is the number one recipient of money from telcos, over $900,000 followed by majority leader Harry Reid with something like $341,000 in monies received. This is pure doublespeak at its finest and it pisses me off.

Leo Laporte
There is a really good video and I put it up on my Tumblr. No I am with you. If you go to FreeForm’s video channel, they have made a video, Larry Lessig’s on this saying a lot of money is coming to Washington D.C. to keep – to basically shut down the open Internet. And the real problem is that net neutrality is such a bad description for what this is. I understand from a technical point of view why they call it net neutrality, but what we’re really saying is companies should not be allowed to discriminate about the traffic that’s going out on the Internet for their petty business reasons. The Internet was designed to be agnostic about all traffic, to treat all business equal, and no company should be allowed, no Internet service provider should be allowed in any way to impinge on that.

This video, I’m going to play a little section of it because I found it very moving.

[Video] (1:28:34)

Leo Laporte
This is the founder of Kiva.

[Video] (1:28:38)

Leo Laporte
[ph] Ed Feldman from Princeton. (1:29:00)

[Video] (1:29:02)

Leo Laporte
That’s Ed Frank. (1:29:27)

[Video] (1:29:27)

Leo Laporte
Adam McKay.

[Video] (1:29:30)

Leo Laporte
Talking about Skype.

[Video] (1:30:03)

Leo Laporte
That’s father of the Internet net surf (1:30:14).

[Video] (1:30:14)

Leo Laporte
We’re sitting here, I mean, doing this on the open Internet even though a company like Comcast might want to block it because it hurts their business of selling television content. We use Skype instead of telephony even though that might put PacBell or AT&T out of business because we are not using their service, we are just using their bits. What we do is based on the open internet. I know Jason Calacanis, you must feel the same way. You wouldn’t be here without an open internet either.

Jason Calacanis
Yeah I mean it’s – are you going to trust your future to Verizon or Comcast? Are you going to trust those guys, I am not. I don’t think they’ll do the right thing, I think they’re going to do the right thing that’s for their shareholders and for their CEOs to make a lot of money. And the internet has been the greatest force for good and for sharing of information and democracy, forever. It’s just insane that we are even this discussion and I hope that people are not complacent about this. This is one of those things where it is very easy to get complacent about it and I think what we might be faced with is, I think we might lose the open internet and then we are going to all have to fight and it’s going to be a lot harder to fight to fix this than it would be to prevent this.

Leo Laporte
AT&T is telling its employee’s contact your member of Congress and tell him you support these bills. This is a big fight. There is a lot of money. If you believe in the open internet and I think if you listen to this show I think you must believe in the open internet. You have…

Patrick Norton
We ask you to believe in the open internet.

Leo Laporte
It wouldn’t be here without it. I got to ask you to write to your member of Congress and say please, support – throw these bills out and support the FCC’s regulations for net neutrality. It is absolutely vital. This is something – you may not care about privacy but you got to care about this.

Natali Del Conte
And we care about innovation as well. There was a recent study that I was reading in Europe that when there is more regulation of anything like this then innovation goes down significantly and that’s – these are the web tools that we live and breathe every single day, that would go away if people are not thinking in terms of an open filter.

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Jason Calacanis
One day you might wake up and it is like, you know what, I was going to call my mum on Skype but she is on Verizon, I am on Comcast and they want a fee and I can’t use Skype or Google Voice, there’s this a great product – Gmail now doesn’t work with Yahoo! Mail. If you want to be on Yahoo! – it would set us back 15 years. It’s just unbelievable, and I mean, just shame on these companies really to the people of Verizon and AT&T and Comcast and the people who work there, don’t send those letters on behalf of your employers and inside of your companies, I know it’s a risky thing to do. But for the leadership, gosh how do you sleep at night knowing that you want to take something that’s been so valuable to so many. You don’t need to corrupt this, I mean you are making a lot of money already, last time I saw Comcast, Verizon and AT&T are crushing it, I mean how much more money do you DBs need to make? F you guys, greedy bastards. Really, I mean what…

Leo Laporte
Couldn’t have said it better.

Jason Calacanis
No, seriously these greedy mother…

Natali Del Conte
Isn’t this cool.

Jason Calacanis
…[ph] effers (1:34:02) are going to, now they will start like oh, by the way, yeah, which level of internet service did you want, or do you, oh you haven’t subscribed to the voice over IP channel, we will get you HBO and VOIP and oh, there’s an extra fee for gaming packets and oh, you are a level 57…

Patrick Norton
You want to use peer-to-peer? Oh that’s an extra $35 a day.

Jason Calacanis
No, no, that’s going to be an extra $19.95 a month

Leo Laporte
Yeah. Comcast is actually trying to overturn the FCC regulation that forbid them from doing that deep packet inspection and turning off BitTorrent saying, oh they exceeded their authority, they aren’t allowed to do that, that was an illegal decision and we’d like to keep doing it. If people, people who have the notion that somehow these companies are not going to assert their commercial rights and cut this stuff off, you are not, you are not paying attention, you are not paying attention. They want to do this. They are working hard to do it. They are lobbying very hard right now in congress.

Jason Calacanis
Look at Apple, I mean look at Apple with the iPhone.

Leo Laporte
Google voice.

Jason Calacanis
Locking into one network, I mean Apple, everybody loves Apple, great company. They will do whatever they have to do to make more money. These other companies, Verizon, Comcast, I mean these guys are gangsters. I mean…

Leo Laporte
Well, I guess we have said it. So a little advocacy from all of us at TWiT, write to your member of Congress.

Natali Del Conte
I don’t think I lost my cool enough. Do you want me to start throwing things?

Patrick Norton
Oh it’s brilliant. It’s like the – how can you vote against the Internet Freedom Act. You will get killed. It’s like voting against the Patriot Act. I mean it’s just…

Jason Calacanis
And how is John McCain supporting this?

Patrick Norton
It’s so scumbaggy. That’s the problem. It’s Internet – it’s the ‘Internet large ISPs Right to Take You Anyway They Can’ Act. That’s what this is all about. This is about AT&T wanting to be able to restrict VOIP access. It’s about Comcast wanting to rake it in on crushing P2P and other traffic they find annoying like video traffic. And what it comes down to is that in many cases they don’t deliver the level of service they want or they feel they are incapable of delivering a level of service the customers think they have paid for. You’ve got 16 megabits except we only want to give it to you when you are downloading one webpage at a time. Not for video, not for software downloads, certainly not for peer-to-peer. And you look at what’s going on and it’s really depressing. I mean how much money is AT&T spending on technical economists – I love that name. Well, if people actually really want to have this level of service 24x7 for downloads they would need to be equivalent of corporate account and that’s a $400 a month fee. We can’t afford to do this.

Leo Laporte
There is a place you can go, savetheinternet.com. They are – they have been around for a long time fighting for net neutrality if you want to read more, find out what’s going on. They will help you contact your member of Congress. You can fan them on Facebook, you can use them on Twitter. You could tell your story and I think this is the best way to get active, savetheinternet.com.

Jason Calacanis
And tweet that and to John McCain who fought for freedom and people’s ability to have democracy, shame on you like…

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Jason Calacanis
What did you go fight for if you now going to be such a – in the pocket of these billionaire DBs you know, like, really you fought for freedom and the network that’s providing so much freedom around the globe, you want to start limiting? Really? Take a deep long look in the mirror, why did you fight and why were you in a POW camp? And now you are going to come back to the United States and for $900,000 you are going to be bought and sold like a commodity? You – so disappointed in John McCain. I am so glad you didn’t vote for him.

Leo Laporte
Well, there that’s a good way to end this one. I think, while you are listening to the show, go to savetheinternet.com. Natali Del Conte, thank you so much for being here.

Natali Del Conte
Thank you having me. I had a really nice time.

Leo Laporte
We tried to get Natali to lose her cool but she just wouldn’t do it.

Natali Del Conte
That was it. That’s what it looks like.

Leo Laporte
natalidelconte.com is the website. Of course, buzzoutloud.cnet.com, bol.cnet.com and loaded…

Natali Del Conte
She looks way comfortable over there in your recliner with her glass of wine.

Leo Laporte
We’re drinking a couple today, the Malbec 2007, delicious. Thank you Patrick Norton, I am so glad we got you back. How’s is Shane? Is he doing okay?

Patrick Norton
He’s good. His grandparents are in town. We had a big, not a big gathering – we had a bunch of small creatures over to celebrate his second birthday with brunch and cake. So there was sugar field mayhem.

Leo Laporte
I saw your tweets about daylight savings. I guess he just really didn’t understand that sweets just...

Patrick Norton
Yes, he woke up at 4:16 this morning, so we had a fun, festive time with cars and train tracks and a little bit of Wubsy and then we went off to get bagels at 10 to 6 this morning.

Leo Laporte
I got to like the kid that likes bagels.

Patrick Norton
Can I tell folks about something real quick before I split?

Leo Laporte
Please do.

Patrick Norton
So HD Nation is the, revision3.com and HD Nation, we are actually going to be down covering Blu-Con on Tuesday, blue-con.com and that’s a gathering of basically Martin Scorsese’s keynoting several other people but it’s a gathering of hopefully we hope some new and exciting new HD technologies come out there from the Blu-ray consortium. And if not, we are definitely going to get to hear from a lot of the studio heads about what they are doing with Blu-ray, what they expect to be coming? So hopefully we’ll have some words on some new stuff on that.

Leo Laporte
Say, are you driving to CES?

Patrick Norton
I probably will drive to CES. I may even…

Leo Laporte
Can I put some equipment in your truck?

Patrick Norton
Yes, if I drive to CES, you can put some equipment in my truck. It’s become a tradition at this point.

Leo Laporte
Yes, yes. I have a few cameras, a switcher, some audio equipment, you don’t mind, do you?

Patrick Norton
I am actually, I meant to e-mail you. You said you are coming to CES. That’s like Leo’s coming to CES. I thought it was better to cover CES from far, far away I was like Leo is going to CES.

Leo Laporte
I thought I should go one last time before the conference dies.

Patrick Norton
It was huge last year. I don’t think it’s going to be much smaller this year.

Leo Laporte
We are going to be doing this show all day Friday from CES from the show floor.

Natali Del Conte
Oh fine.

Patrick Norton
Where are you going to be? Right on the show floor.

Leo Laporte
I think in the back in the Pioneer pavilion but we haven’t decided yet because we are trying to figure out how we are going to get our signal out. So…

Patrick Norton
It’s a nightmare. There is, I have had some pretty hardcore network guys that work with their hotels down there and the routing’s difficult and the routing on the show floor is miserable at best even if you pay a lot of money for a guaranteed rate.

Leo Laporte
I know. And it’s a lot of money, I think its $5,000 [ph] for aT1 (1:40:52) but we are talking to this company called TodoCast that NewTek is working with

Patrick Norton
Oh cool!

Leo Laporte
It does a little – 1.2 megabits satellite upstream and It only needs is a little…

Patrick Norton
And what like 6 bucks a minute.

Leo Laporte
No, no, no, no all we need is a little fiber channel out to them. So we are going to work on that but we might need your help getting the gear down here because I am bringing the entire TWiT Cottage offline down on Virgin America…

Patrick Norton
If the annual, if the now annual drive to CES continues, I will be glad to load some gear for you.

Natali Del Conte
I probably could have because I spell it without an ‘e’.

Leo Laporte
You could easily have been in there.

Natali Del Conte
That’s her fault but I didn’t try.

Leo Laporte
We don’t have an E on the name, you didn’t need to E on the other name.

Natali Del Conte
No, although people like to say Natali because of it.

Leo Laporte
Natali.

Natali Del Conte
Yes.

Leo Laporte
Thank you everybody. Thank you all for joining us today. I really appreciate it. Do go to savetheinternet.com. This is one I am going to get behind. We really got to fight this one or you won’t have TWiT if you don’t.

Jason Calacanis
Please don’t kill TWiT.

Leo Laporte
Don’t kill TWiT.

Jason Calacanis
Verizon, Comcast and AT&T.

Leo Laporte
Yes, yes, kill them instead.

Jason Calacanis
Exactly.

Leo Laporte
We’ll see you next week. Another TWiT. Thank you. Oh, oh the phone’s ringing.

Jason Calacanis
This is terrible, sorry...

Leo Laporte
Mark Cuban’s calling.

Jason Calacanis
Yes, hold on a second. Hold on Mark, yes. No, you should not sign Stephon Marbury. He’s a disaster. Hold on a second.